ARTIST'S STATEMENT (Patreon)

The gallery has asked for my " Artist's Statement". This is my first big burst of work on it. Opinions appreciated.

 Ever since I fell in love with drawing in 1963, I felt a purpose beyond  simply creating. In those early, naïve days, I felt I had a purpose: to  help make a better world by providing it with art of a special sort...a  sort with feelings so extreme, it might exorcise the viewer's pain.  That is what made me defy the cruel opposition of my family. 

The  resultant anger and dissatisfaction with the truths of life that grew  in evidence have always driven my work. We were not wealthy; though I  went to art courses after high school hours and later college classes,  it was my choice not to undergo art school conditioning. A career in art  meant independence. 

I forged ahead feverishly. In my work,  human emotion, casual cruelty and their natural byproduct, pain, are  ever-present motifs. In a culture that demands the smothering of truths,  I feel I have a mission to express, to speak to others whose needs and  feelings are not being addressed in life as well as art; to lash open  the curtain to expose the underrepresented beauty of America’s shabby.
 Joy is another extremity. I parody the excesses of popular culture. The  female figures are a culmination of art’s ideals through art history to  the voluptuosity of vintage Hollywood, commercial art and the burlesque  stage. I depict the “common man’s”wish fulfillments with sensuality  swelled to bursting, expressed in rich impasto or heavy slathers of  black. I want color you can eat, like rich, frothy bread. In a sole  work, I try to encourage the viewer to walk into the frame. I want a  roomful of them to swallow the spectator. Inspired by Renaissance  drawing, I put serious thought into keeping my figures and backgrounds  full bodied and full of motion, to never do anything 'easily', to always  twist the figures and perspectives into going that 'extra mile'.
I  am at heart an American cartoonist and have a difficulty with  segregating my art as ‘African American’. I consider my art to be  international; Asian brush paintings, Expressionism, Pop Art; it is  better to ask what I am not influenced by. My inspirations span time and  globe.
   My interest is rarely in recapturing or approximating  reality, but in creating new ideas and forms and in giving them their  own unique life.