Take something from the past and make it new.
My work from the last two or three years has been an exploration of cubist ideas, combined with transparency which I first saw in Australian aboriginal x-ray drawings, and figure drawing.
As I look at my work from 2014 there are early explorations of combining cubist concepts, space flattened and broken into planes created by the subject and its environment, combined with transparency. For a while color seemed to be a distraction and most work is black and white or done in muted monotones. Then there is a move away from works showing several views of one subject to more than one subject. The latest path my work is taking is towards bold color with much more abstraction in the figures.
All this is still following what could be called transparent cubism. In a way this seems odd to me because I rarely think of either of these concepts in relation to my work anymore. Cubism is really just a starting point. Along the way came more organic treatment of shape and line and a feeling of time and/or movement, and always in the back of my mind a desire to find a story in an image.
And through it all I ask myself, “why digital painting?” The only answer I can give is that through most of my career as a Graphic Designer I worked on a computer and that is most familiar to me. But as I think about it there is more. On a computer I can work in layers, move things around, remove others entirely. You will see here very few images where layers were not moved adjusted or rearranged.
Looking at my work I remember one of my instructors in college would ask, “what does it want to be?” I am discovering that as I work. Somehow, as an artist, I cannot stand still. When I am not working, it’s what I think about. When I am working, I think about how the next piece can be an expansion of what I am doing now. Sometimes it gives me an idea totally unrelated to what is in front of me. I cannot stop.