Through my work I am trying to build an emotional momentum, one that rouses the intellectual exercise of questioning one’s vision of reality. While looking at my artwork, the viewer will begin to experience a series of diametrically opposed thoughts and emotions. Initially they may feel overwhelmed by the obsessively intricate and highly detailed forms, the composition, the technical skill and the pleasant color vibrations but as an analytical shift in perception slowly overtakes them, the viewer unwittingly grasps the artwork’s inescapably wretched and subversive subject matter.
This new clarity forces the observer to reengage with the work and rethink their initial opinions until, in some way or another, the shift takes place and the observer’s perception of natural things expands to include elements such as disease and death itself.
While these types of human experiences are often veiled, the artwork truly embraces them and functions as a reminder of our ephemeral existence and places in doubt our vain and materialistic way of understanding life. This intellectual exercise will continue to expand until the conceptual structures of the artwork, particularly it’s elemental lack of apparent reciprocity, unwaveringly pushes the viewer to put them together into the same aesthetic context.
In turn, a new meaning evolves and gives birth to a poetic paradox, a concept that I have been developing for 4 years and include in each piece that I produce. I also want to share my own vision of life and what I think matters the most. Maybe the viewer will engage with my work in such a way that it encourages introspection or solves an issue, or possibly they may become morally disturbed and confused; but whatever the outcome, the ultimate intention of my work is to open a dialog and incite thought and reflection, which I think must be the primordial pursuit of contemporary art.
Q: What are your hopes and dreams or future goals?
A: To better build out my own mythology stories within my personal work. To build more opportunities and to keep collaborating with others that I admire so much.
Q: If you could do any project with full funding what would it be?
A: Directing my own movie. Bringing my paintings to life. Cinema to me is the ultimate art form. The place where visual and sound can truly mix, come alive, and fully immerse the viewer in a world other than their own.
Q: If you could meet any artist who is no longer living, who would it be and why?
A: Would definitely have to be Jim Henson. I got to meet him once in Boston as a child when I was part of an HBO focus group with other kids to test Fraggle Rock before it was put on the air. But now as an adult I would love to sit down and have coffee and just talk about the world that he created and what he left us with. I just love his work so much. If I was to get starstruck he would be that person. He is my biggest hero in the artistic world.
Q: Have these sort of haunting themes always been of interest to you?
A: I honestly don’t put too much thought into it. The themes for each piece is more about the imagery which hits me all at once. Then I consider whether or not it’s a good enough idea to spend time and to execute. I think there’s a lot of sadness in our world and that leads itself into my work which can often give it maybe a haunting feeling.
Q: Have you ever seen a ghost?
A: There have been times when I have absolutely felt a presence of something unseen being there. Quite often actually. Things are left behind from past lives and all around us. Those things leave ripples. Those ripples are actually with me right now as I type this. But, as far as a ghost you might see in Ghostbusters then no, I’ve never seen that.
Q: Do you have a favorite ghost story?
There’s a place called Glencoe where I spent my summers growing up as a child. This is a very small town with dirt roads running deep into the woods in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. There were numerous ghost stories the old-timers would tell. But there was one that always stood out to me. Less then a quarter of a mile down the road where I vacationed there were these old train tracks that I used to walk on. These were the same tracks that the coal mine train would travel to reach its destination back before all the coal mines dried up on the island. As the story goes, one time there was a man who was struck down by the coal mine train at a road crossing while he was working on the tracks. And now at night time, even though no more trains run on those tracks some say you can sometimes hear a train’s horn blasting away and see a light from a train get brighter and brighter as it heads towards you but just before the train reaches you it disappears. Maybe not that scary but for sure it’s one of the ghost stories I heard growing up that still remains with me today.