Artist Statement
Global and personal challenges provoked this series by leading an internal inquiry into what stimulates and nourishes my decisions as an artist. The honest pursuit of my creative experience has culminated as Hue-Topia. I have found an undeniable correlation between the richness of color and my desire to translate my physiological responses to color through painting. Between the act of painting and its results, Hue-Topia articulates the solutions to my original inquiry.
My initial physiological response to visual information serves a judicial purpose in the process of building the work. The images are chosen from a mature archive collected from social media—where I often find savory moments of saturated color and content. Color, subjects, and composition are conceived through collages constructed of curated images that indulge my physiological response to their combinations. The formal and conceptual results of the collage provide a map that guides the painting, allowing the paint to serve as the vehicle for my interpretation of visual information.
Color, surface qualities, and subject matter embrace the ostentatious nature of an archive born from social media. The vibrant colors and subject matter found in the paintings exist as an invitation to indulge, guilt free, in an imagined space of colorful splendor. My series becomes a quick thrill for viewers by drawing them in and letting them go, catering to the shortened attention span of popular culture.
As recent events persist, the process of painting Hue-Topia presented itself an overall response to many challenges and losses of the infamous year of 2020. Shifting my expression of painting to indulge positive and stimulating content created a cathartic experience. The dreamy spaces surrounding each figure settle into the canvas as my imagined utopia, coping with the plight of the world.
