 |
Although my works all loosely fall into the genre of portraiture, they are more than mere likenesses. They have been created as much from my imagination as from life. What immediately attracts attention is their sheer color. My palette is obviously not a natural one. It is bold and bright, and at times playfully lurid. But I would not call myself a “colorist”, my approach is too graphical. If anything, I am a “mark-maker” and my mark of choice is the line. With just a few deft contours I manage to capture my models' external features before moving on to heavier, more impulsive strokes to evoke their mental and emotional characteristics. I am on a self-imposed and relentless quest for character. But to bring out a person's distinctive nature, I cannot rely on observation alone. Outward signals, no matter how keenly interpreted, are never fully conclusive.
To complete the picture, I must use my intuition and, when that too reaches its limit, I must turn to my final, and incidentally inexhaustible, resort: the imagination. For me this is a perfectly valid way of depicting my subjects. I do not believe in an absolute truth. For me, every person is a creation of their onlooker. People are apparitions. They don't manifest in just one single form but in as many forms as there are individual onlookers, or rather perceivers. Perceiving means conceiving.
In this respect, we are all figments of each other's imagination. We are visions and at the same time visionaries. Some of us just like to commit our visions to paper and canvas.
|
 |
|