Pirate:Contemporary Art

The  Artist
For over thirty years I have been recording urban and natural landscapes based on my travels and where I live. I have taught drawing and painting for over a decade at universities and community colleges in the Denver area. These observational documents are part of a visual journal. In the context of a journal the objects and spaces recorded are in response to things that caught my attention, resonated, and sparked my need to visually explore further. How I display the work is a unique process of grouping that is meant to challenge conventional ways of how art is viewed. Ascribed methods of display, especially of representational or figurative art, are most often about viewer convenience that allows easy accessibility and judgement. Art becomes comfortable and familiar, reduced to a product in a store display. If the art is expressive, an emotional and intellectual gesture, the display should confirm and support this expressiveness and be just as inventive and creative. The idea behind my displays is to reduce the inherently market supported exclusivity of representational art, to bring it down (literally hung lower, on the floor, or in a heap), to pair it with popular and fun images or objects, to obscure or not show the art but allude to its presence, to use or pair it with sketches made with non-archival materials, to show it in second hand frames (art as a sustainable endeavor) all in response to relinquishing some of the ego that elevates and drives its exclusivity.