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ARTIST STATEMENT
I'm an Artist -- a lyrical storyteller with a love for French New Wave Girls with tube socks, but who doesn't. Almost like tagging my own work, I try to ghost in and sock you right in the face with a huge cast of re-occurring characters who are not ashamed to carry their emotions and scars on there shoulders! I want their pain to show growth and sex appeal.
“I am hard at work completing the final installation and largest piece for the new show which I have named: "Deep in the Woods". This is the latest of my new work for the upcoming May 1st solo show at Cain Schulte Contemporary Art, co-curated by Jon Joseph of Aftermodern. This painting is one of my largest ever. It is 7 feet vertically and comprised of three 3 foot hinged panels mixed media on museum framed wood, so that when fully extended it is 7’ x 9’. My intent is to invite the viewer to walk right into the woods and sit down amidst the characters that I have created for this piece. This is something I would like to do with all my work and is one of the driving motivations for choosing the street to produce huge public art projects to be shared by everyone. "Deep in the Woods" consists of three hinged panels painted together as one. My lead female character seems to be hiding in the woods attempting to come to terms with her darkest loss of love or traveling back to her childhood place of refuge. Either way, she is soul searching, she holds a locket possibly with her parents close to her heart for a much needed place of organic rebirth. Like all my work, my characters and the stories they tell force the viewer to come to terms with their own stories. I share my own personal or political dreams in my work! "Deep in the Woods" is a hinged screen, it has versatility and stands on it's own. It has become an incredibly unique art slash furniture or room divider. This can also live as a classic Chinese Changing Skreen piece, and of course I'm painting on it right now. Hanging with wings fully extended directly on the wall creates a beautiful and powerful mural.
My art represents a collection of how I grew up and the eternal fight we all have to find our own voice. I have worked very hard to connect the two sides of my life to strongly co-exist and still organically SLAM you from across the room when needed or tack your dark subconscious memory while holding strong with my own thumbprint! My father worked for Willem de Kooning and his Abstract Expressionism was the real fucking deal. He was an Artist’s artist. In the 1950's and 60's it was Punk Rock to do what he and the Cedar Bar crew of New York artists were creating! "Action Art" was a phrase both my working artist parents would say and
do. Crank John Coltrane and feel it, I mean really feel it and by sun-rise the next morning there would be this amazing painting oozing with jazz, and maybe a few roaches. I do this with parts of the first stages of my backgrounds because of what I saw my parents and their friends doing. I was very lucky to have artists like Robert Rauschenberg and musicians like Bob Dylan and The Band around me as a child growing up between Upstate NY in Woodstock and constantly going to openings in New York City. That balance is still with me and my art today.
Then the West Coast turned me on to Latin Art and the Water band Familia, something that was completely different than the commune and urban experience of the East Coast. I loved the murals on the sides of SO- CAL Liquor stores, even 99 cent stores with the hand painted Tide Soap next to a crudely painted burrito was fucking genius, it's true everything is art. I start building textures with gel mediums and hard to find collectables sealing them with resins, old newspaper books and magazines, spray painting patterns and stencils, French vintage wallpaper, fine point hand inked characters of mine, oil bars, porn, Mexican soap opera comics, you name it! I try to achieve a beautifully aged alley wall or that perfect looking billboard before the new one goes up with parts of images you can see and worn out glue that turned yellow from the sun. This is when the stories start coming alive, some of the characters I sand down and make look as old as the backgrounds and silkscreen images that look aged. Then comes the lead character and I love for this part to sock it to you from blocks away. That’s when I did my job right. The second half of who I'm as an artist -- a lyrical storyteller with a love for French New Wave Girls with btube socks, but who doesn't. Almost like tagging my own work, I try to ghost in and sock you right in the face with a huge cast of re-occurring characters who are not ashamed to carry their emotions and scars on there shoulders! I want their pain to show growth and sex appeal. I feel honesty is very sexy.
I have fought hard to surrealistically create strange unique characters who drift in and out with my thumbprint! I would hate to be a hyper-realist, can you imagine if Picasso or Diego Rivera, who created characters even cartoonish at times, were to have painted text book real life? They may as well have been photographers! I'm passionate about this issue because I think a lot of credit should go to artists who distort and twist their subjects as they create their own pop culture cast of characters and landscapes who are fighting wars, bleeding from the heart, discovering their sexuality, and fighting for basic human rights! As an artist, that’s how I would like to be thought of. I want my audience to think about these matters when getting sucked into my dreams and stories! This is fine art just as much as someone who suggests a human form with a pallet knife, both beautiful! I personally just get a hell of a lot more off on stylizing the players in my mural paintings when I keep realism down to a minimum. As ridiculous as it sounds, I travel all over the world through my art by using other languages and lyrical flows. Yes this is a poor man’s plane trip, but after years and years, I can safely say I know who my characters are and how they cry, what they’re willing to die for and most importantly where they want to be when they grow up.”
Aaron Edward White
Copyright © 2009 by Aaron White and Jonathan D. Joseph. |
