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| Artist Statement |
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| For me to paint something, it has to break my heart. An unbearable situation is what grabs me. By painting it –or elements of it, I can engage with and change what is unchangeable. True, a purely childish, neurotic desire is there, denial, fantasy---to make terrible endings into good ones. But for me, as these bright, cartoony paintings propose happy endings, the truth is inevitably ghosted beside them.
This is not revisionist history. The absurdity of the revised assertions do not ask to be taken literally. They take a hammer to common knowledge, so we can look inside again, and feel it.
Contrast (between true and false) is heightened more by distorting what happened than by futile struggling to get the facts exactly perfect--- which can never be accomplished, even by those who were there.
Famous journal-keepers---Anne Frank, Meriwether Lewis, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John---painting them is how my background in writing currently manifests itself in my paintings---that and my obsession with the image of human scrawl shouldered onto a page.
What else do these journalists have in common? They all have faith; they believe what happens to them is worth writing down. It means something, it matters. They want someone else to know.
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