ARTIST STATEMENT
My current paintings and drawings are made up of small incremental marks and/or line-infused, limpet-like “blobs” of paint that are built up over time to take over entire surfaces and forms. While embracing a slow and laborious process, my work investigates the generative potential of repetition while addressing how repetition can be non-static and involve an element of play.
In the vein of action painting, these works are largely born from a physical engagement with materials. My actions, however, are not broad and sweeping. They are not gestural or heroic. My actions are little. I do a lot of squeezing, touching, pinching and loving. I make great efforts to create careful, exacted marks, but am often forced to give in to the fumbling and nervous nature of my own hand. Inevitable awkwardness becomes an integral part of a work’s final character and effect.
This physical handling and mark making merges with a child-like fascination with accretion - inadvertently leading me to create fields of graphic patterns where ideas of connectivity are toyed with and where the seemingly endless nature of microscopic, biological and galactic worlds is insinuated. My paintings and drawings, like these worlds, simultaneously convey a sense of the infinite and the elemental. I feel that successful pieces can be experienced both from a distance, as potentially never ending fields, and on a more intimate level, where one is immersed in constellations of tiny, unruly details. I liken this effect to the way the fabric of space appears cohesive and smooth until it is examined at a quantum level and is realized to be unpredictable and chaotic.
In these displays of excessive simplicity, I want laborious meticulousness, the texture of time and the residue of pensive thought to collide with tender humor and a pleasure in the absurd. I am interested in the personal, the otherworldly and the power of solitary labor to connect with both. Yet, despite my inclination towards metaphysical concerns, I irreverently surrender any promise of prophecy or enlightenment. My work is instead a combination of admiration and skepticism for similar rituals of spiritualistic devotion and their relentless pursuits of divinity.
5/2010
© 2010 Mason Eubanks