Abstract
As an artist, my primary medium is painting. For reference, I look at found photographs and captured video stills, coupled with ideas from my imagination and sketchbook. I take compositions that are populated with objects and figures that are recognizable and make them strange. My intent is to make a viewer feel at once engaged and disoriented, with visual surprises and logical discontinuities in spatial relations.
My paintings seem fictionalized, containing passages that are clearly not from observed reality. I am interested in the experience of longing for a relationship that cannot be attained. Relationships between individuals can be imagined to create a fiction that is both appealing and impossible. My painted works call this to mind by presenting a level of improbability of visual elements that could only be conceived in one's mind.
In my practice, painting is a process that lives in a realm of its own. Regardless of a given painting’s subject, I am inspired by innumerable sources ranging from music to literature to art history. I execute paintings intuitively, trying to see everything that paint can do and become; I strive to engage painting headfirst, overemphasizing color, pattern and texture and exulting in the potential of the medium.
Formally, my work lives in the nebulous spectrum between abstraction and representation: there are always commonly discernible objects or figures, but they are in contrast with abstracted areas of color and mark-making. Rules of mark-making and spatial construction are set up and subsequently violated in the same work. This yields an inability to fully establish a sense of one's bearings within the painting, a condition that is engaging and fascinating but tragically impossible.
Recommended Citation
Bay, Grant
(2014)
"head first only,"
Art Journal: Vol. 2014:
Iss.
1, Article 8.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/art_journal/vol2014/iss1/8