“All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Lately, it seems that my fellow human beings have taken vast amounts of sleeping pills to numb their sense of the world around them. Instead of taking charge of this planet’s situation and its near future, which will undoubtedly make or break humanity (at least for a while), people increasingly ask for handouts, interest rate cuts, patriot acts, bailout plans, stimulus packages: artificial securities which do nothing in the long run but put people to sleep intellectually. They succumb; they become apathetic; they become desensitized. This is an unfortunate symptom of living in difficult times such as these. As long as they accept the solutions to problems given to them without questioning them, most will remain asleep and thus unable to experience life the way it was meant to be experienced—freely and abundantly. In order to shape a better tomorrow, they’ll first have to wake up from apathy and seize life by the horns.
I therefore take it as my personal duty to shake people out of this trend in naïve complacency in whatever way I can. Through my artwork, I wish to awaken the natural sense of wonder, inherent in all human beings, that currently lies dormant in far too many of them. I want people to question what is handed to them and allow themselves to see things from new perspectives. Think--if our evidence of truth comes only from the senses, then it becomes the artist’s job to stimulate and reinvigorate the sense of the viewer--this will help him realize a better truth for himself. Ultimately, I hope that my artwork will electrify and empower the viewer with a new will to shape the future the way he wants to see it.
This can be done in a number of ways, and usually the medium I choose will help direct into concreteness the basic vision I already have in my head. Experimenting with different media over the years has yielded some interesting results so far. Calligraphy ink, for example, lends itself to pleasing variation in the thickness of lines; thus, I’ll use that to my advantage and develop wonderful line patterns reminiscent of crop circles from the 1970s. Spray-paint, on the other hand, has a great plurality in the different things you can do with it. I’ve been using it off and on for about a year and I still have the feeling that I’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg of its potential. In humid weather, I can liberally apply many colors of spray-paint to one spot on the illustration board and watch in wonder as gravity drags the colors down and together in strange formations. (It doesn‘t work in other weather because the sun dries evaporates everything except the pigment, which makes it clumpy and unpleasant.) I can also use the cap of the spray-paint can itself to twist and pull out layers of color and form them into striking patterns. This usually ends up turning into metaphysical or surreal imagery which intends to evoke a sense of joy and/or wonder in the viewer.
Although my artwork has little to no relation to empirical or phenomenal reality, I hope it will serve to help the viewer wake up and come to grips with it. I like to imagine my artwork as the precise moment of awakening--you know the one. The moment when you’ve seen something so bizarre or fantastic that you know you must be dreaming and you’ll have to wake soon. I want it to be like Dali saying, “God damn it, wake up! I have more vitality in my moustache than you’ve in your entire body!” I want my artwork to be the slap in the face that stings the eyes and the minds of its audience, something that gets people to snap out of the banality of their lives, gets people to stop for a moment and witness the powerfully immense beauty of Earth. Consequently, that audience that I just shocked into consciousness will sincerely attempt to preserve this ephemeral sphere that we inhabit—before it vanishes like a fleck of dust in the history book of the Universe. If my artwork can help people take even the smallest of steps toward that awareness, I will consider my life's purpose complete.