38 Quotes About Contemporary-art

When I first started showing the “Indra’s Jewels” work, I had people coming out of the woodwork saying “Who is this guy? What is he doing? Who does he think he is doing this stuff?” and the more they’d find out they’d go “Oh, he was a painter? He taught for more than decade on the university level? He knows what he’s talking about? Oh, well let’s look at it a little closer.

The Mojave Desert is a harsh, but very spiritual, place. It’s as much a matrix as anything else in my life has been. Growing up in the desert has a different gestalt than growing up in a temperate zone, with its humidity and rainfall. As children growing up in the Mojave, we chased lizards and snakes, instead of frogs and squirrels. There is an arid openness about it, and a true feeling of being alone, that you don’t get in any other type of environment.

It has occurred to me that when one is raised in the absence of culture – without access to galleries and museums – one has to fill the void. I turned to books, album covers, magazines, slides and prints – anything visually stimulating that I could lay my hands on.

The temptation is always to think of Las Vegas as a gambling mecca, the ‘Entertainment Capital of the World’. Well, it’s that. But, it’s a lot more than that as well. There are beautiful natural rock formations, rare plants and animals, and even pseudo-alpine regions. Just because you can see for a hundred miles doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there to see, and open desert allows you to see things in a different way. There is nothing to block your view, and nothing to hide behind.

Living in the desert makes a lot of things very clear. It really gives you an unobstructed view. The severityof the landscape opens people up to their inner selves. St. Anthony went into the wilderness and was tormented by demons. Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert. In an unexpected way, the Mojave is a very spiritual place.

Living in the desert makes a lot of things very clear. It really gives you an unobstructed view. The severity of the landscape opens people up to their inner selves. St. Anthony went into the wilderness and was tormented by demons. Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert. In an unexpected way, the Mojave is a very spiritual place.

The gestalt of living in the desert, surrounded by the desert, was a big influence in my life and in the lives of other artists in this community. There are many artists and musicians who grew up as lonely kids in the desert with nothing to do, and who chose to channel their focus inward. In the Mojave Desert, numinous, mystical experiences are not as rare as one might think. The numinous is a part of the whole artistic experience for the desert artist.

At first, I thought I would use photography and the collage and montage possibilities of Photoshop strictly for visualization in preparation for my paintings. But after I experimented with Photoshop and digital photography, I soon discovered new possibilities and found exciting new ways of presenting ideas. I soon found that I was more interested in pure image-making than I was in actually painting the images. Digital Camera, 2017

When I take a picture of a derelict sign, I already begin to see and find the patterns and shapes that will form the final piece. Once I get the image in the studio, I begin to layer the patterns created, making sure to save the patterns I particularly like. I never lose a layer of work during this process; I simply continue to build and modify those patterns that appeal to me. Digital Camera, 2017