No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Oscar Wilde

 

 

 

I’m a queer man making queer paintings in a post-gay art world. I’m at the crossroads of the heterosexulaization of gay culture. Assimilation can dampen identity as much as diversity can intensify it by highlighting differences; the shift of society to integrate gay culture signifies losing something while at the same time we gain something. There is a cost for having a more homogeneous art world, a blandness that feels very dry.

 

I revel in making paintings that are self-reflective with an absurd narration.  The paintings share a surreal staging with a modernist sensibility.  I am synthesizing and alternating between abstraction and a cartoony comic queer figuration. All the works encompass a range of different concepts. They share in an acceptance of queerness in the realistic world.  The dualism within the paintings contributes something unusual that is secondary to the paintings but something they couldn’t exist without, most of the elements are based on some sort of reality.  The paintings deal with a restrained fantastical flamboyance without breaking all the representative rules. The paintings treat the ordinary (think straight) and the extraordinary (think queer) in a similar fashion.

 

The outcomes end up being more real than fantasy, which gives a focus on the queerness of the world.