portfolio

After reviewing past statements, I reflect on the constancy of my pursuit and set out this re-arrangement of words and ideas in hopes of fresh epiphanies  It is intended more as provocation than narration.

 

I believe in the animateness of the perceptual world and I attempt to make images that manifest that belief. I make animate objects. I try to make sensuous diagrams of growth and change at all scales, harnessing principles of botany& physics for image propagation. I aim to make a painting that revels in its concreteness, yet one that evokes the self-organizing habits of matter, life and thought itself. 

 

I have long used color symbolically as an indicator of difference, and held contrast in hue above all things. Recently, my study of Homer & Inness and evening panoramas (in walks with my dog) has me working toward a new palette— reaching for coloristic effects that may only belong to a representational subject. Sharp tonal changes simulate light effects which provoke figure /ground reversal—the shift between figure & ground, the observed & the observer.

 

I find the concept of broken symmetry a useful operative principle, folding the traditional icon of visual stasis into a compelling image of change. The axis of symmetry provides a keen edge—the point of transformation. Change happens at edge. Folded aluminum gives an interaction of form and surface while satisfying my need for material constraint. Concepts of construction and process initiate a work, or series of works. A rather slow, indirect process has been a way for me to quiet the gestural hand yet give forward motion to a piece tied to chance. 

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Peter Bodnar III