Here are some images of my thesis exhibition in 2010.
This work is very dear to me, and I hope to one day make art on a more regular bases. It is different, that is for sure, but I love it. Two years into grad school and I was deeply involved with traditional painting, and learning the traditions of the masters. I was even using some of the old recipes for bleaching linseed oil, pulverizing iron(II) oxide, mixing my own paint, and everything. I have the deepest respect for the old masters: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bouguereau, Bloch, Hoffman, Ingres.
The deeper I became involved with this research, the more the ethereal mystere of the old masters disappeared. These artists did not worship themselves as we worship them today. For the most part, these artists were simply using the materials available to them at their time to excel in their craft.
There is a lot that is wrong with art today. There is so much emphasis on the genius of the individual. It is in many ways just another route to establishing celebrity status. It is a game that is played. Just wiki the artist Damien Hirst if you want to know what I am talking about.
During grad school I became absolutely fascinated with iconography and how the human mind is able to process imagery and respond so quickly. This is why I like headstone imagery. It is deceptively simple. Some people are over sandblasting, thinking that photo-realism is the future. But this will not be the case. We as humans have always drawn heavily on abstract iconography, and we have a visual iconographic language that rivals the largest supercomputer in terms of complexity.
I find this role to be especially significant in our day. In Rembrandt's era, iconography was not as advanced, and their was a great deal of room to add visual terminology to the language. Today is much different however. With instant global communication we are bombarded with imagery. We are drowning in it. There is and will always be the Da Vinci's and Michelangelo's that create new and exciting visual language, but for every one of them, we need artists that make sense of societies visual language. This is where I find my place. I love designing headstone graphics because of its simplicity. It sits outside of the torrent of visual overload. A cemetery is a beautiful place. It is a gallery wherein we use our skills to represent some of the most important ideas in our lives: our relationships with our loved ones. The lack of interest in headstone imagery is indicative of the sickness of modern art academia. What is the training of the humanities for if not for serving our fellow man? We have become so caught up in self-actualization that we have forgotten the value of serving selflessly. When I design headstone graphics, I put my heart into it. I push myself to take the imagery to a level that it has never been before. But I don't have to put my name on it. When someone looks at an image etched into granite, they don't have to know anything about my "creative genius:" they can simply enjoy the image for its simple nature of purpose: to invoke feeling within the viewer. This is art.
My desire has always been to take the knowledge I gained in the academic world and bring it back to reality, to use my skills to make the lives of those around me a little better. These people are often simple and unsophisticated in the eyes of the world, but it is these people that are real and true.
There may be a day when I return to making fine art. For the time being, I am very happy with my business, designing graphics for monument companies.
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