Me, the Visual Artist

I’ve been painting and exhibiting only for about twelve years now. It didn’t take very long for me to realize that I was never going to be a specialist in the visual arts. I quickly discovered that I wanted to explore everything I could find the time and technique to explore as an artist.
Just as I mix musical genres when performing as the Flute Guy, I mix media in the majority of my art exhibits. I nearly always include drawings, paintings, photographs and found object assemblages in my shows. The mix of genres has become a portion of my signature as an artist, and while some galleries don’t approve of that approach to art, I am more than happy to include what I hope is a stimulating and thought-provoking potpourri of styles and genres in my exhibits.


As I see it, the perceived differences between abstract and figurative art have been greatly overblown. The debate over whether the two are more different than they are similar has raged for decades now, but one thing that binds the two approaches together is hard to deny: even a photograph or a super-realist painting is ultimately no more than a carefully calculated, often ingenious accumulation of shapes, volumes and textures, designed to trick the eye into to thinking we’re seeing the real thing, or at least its essence, which is probably more important.
Indeed, all art is ultimately no more than an immensely playful, finely tuned exercise in deception – of glorious make-believe – even as it is a grand human pilgrimage, an intellectually demanding adventure whose destination is discovery, illumination and understanding.
Like music, dance, literature and poetry, the visual Arts have the innate and incredible power to humanize the people they touch – to make of them creators rather than destroyers, builders rather than dismantlers, forces for kindness rather than forces for hurt. When we bring the Arts to bear on the lives of young children, we are helping prepare them to be thoughtful, considerate, sensitive, caring people – decent people who have the courage to question the presumptions of others – and themselves – while seeking excellence in everything they do.