First, a shout-out and thank you to all my followers (my mom, her brother Lloyd on the mainland, my mom's mail carrier, and her fellow Bikram classmates:)).
These paintings of dogs are self-portraits. They expose obsessive ruminations on identity, memory and desire.
The canines stare out from shallow fields of intense color. Fragmented images from magazines and comics both comfort and taunt them. Countless childhood hours were spent creating sticker and scrapbook albums - designing and composing story lines on the pages. Pop culture, with its diversions and bright, happy colors, was a welcome escape from an ever-changing home life.
I paint the dogs from photographs to reinforce the feeling of detachment. Images are continually added and subtracted, reconsidered and painted back - each new mark points the canvas in an entirely different direction. With it's constant reworking, a painting can take years to complete. The result is dense and layered, with secrets and narratives that lurk beneath the outer facade.
For inspiration, I look towards the artist Francis Bacon, whose work balances austere graphics with raw, emotional imagery. I also admire Amy Sillman's paintings, and her convergence of intuitive gestures with reasoned thought.
When the disparate images have been reconciled, I have created a world that is simultaneously buoyant and brutal. The subjects, colors and textures combine to reveal an agitated, dreamlike state. The mystery has been deepened, yet it is the journey, as well as the conclusion, that has been embraced."
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So many of life's conflicts have kept us from embracing the dark origins of our fears. It is a revealing journey not meant by everyone. We have denied the truth to exist, we hide from it, we suppress it, and we try to distort it. Eventually, it shows itself and we are forced to acknowledge it.
ReplyDeletewow. very powerful, Jana!
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