Concentration
The need to capture moments of life in still shots consumes me today. Fears of forgetting significant events torture my mind constantly, so much so the “living in the moment” has disappeared almost completely. I hide my face behind the lens of a camera or the screen of an iPhone to suspend instants that should be lived in.
My art approaches the idea that snapshots of human faces will soon be the only interaction with people that we have. Instead of going to see a member of the family or close friend that lives an hour from you, you choose to keep up with them on Facebook or Instagram or any other form of social media, therefore materializing the connection. Quickly, the relationship becomes dimensionless, much like the portraits of faces I have drawn. When all we seek to look at is a flat portrayal of a person, all we gain is a plane of understanding of other human being.
My beginning works consisted of rudimentary sketches in charcoal of human and animal faces, such as in Shut it Out, New Eyes, Animal Skull, and Benches. These works developed into Val Pal, Swans, Mirrors, Call me Brother, and Cuz, where I took two images of one person and sketched them on to charcoal paper with either black charcoal or black acrylic paint. The result is the appearance of a flat human face smiling artificially at a camera. These pieces developed into large, monochromatic watercolors done on white watercolor paper entitled Sara, Ryan, and Mallory. The use of one color signifies the uniformity and lack of sentiment in each photograph. And finally, the pieces evolved into drawings done in pen of a photograph on to several copies of the original photograph, as seen in Look Up, Blink, and Twinkle. The end result is a series of work that captures the overall despair and lifelessness that comes from the overuse of everyday photography.