Omnis Series Artist Statement

Omnis Series Artist Statement

One usually sees the prefix omni attached to words such as omnipresent, omnipotence, and omniscience as descriptors of divinity. It is a word derived from the Latin Omnis meaning all. Nature is omni. This series is a subcategory of my Primus or first marks body of work culled from world rock art imagery. Images of animals, human eyes and other symbolic images drifted into an all over set of marks. These marks were applied with heavy impasto acrylic layers built up on Masonite grounds. A unified textural surface has been and still is my goal for these paintings. The following Mark Tobey statement is apropos:

A painting should be a textile, a texture. That's enough! Perhaps I was influenced by my mother. She used to sew and sew. I can still see that needle going. Maybe that's what I'd rather do than anything with the brush-like stitching over and over and over, laying it in, going over, bringing it up. Bringing it up. That's what is difficult.

We live in an era of technology powered by electricity. Our very bodies are full of energy with electric nerve impulses abounding, interacting throughout our body enabling us to touch and feel. Landscape is layered by the traces of weather impacting the surface of the earth and altering it through stratified layers and disturbance due to the weathering process. Water in the form of snow, hard rain and ice leaves trace marks or patterns. Complex sublime vistas require the expressions of both painter and poet. In short, our very existence/creation is a swirling mass of intricate and intense all over activity full of patterns and layers of matter. Painting has a long history, especially in the 20th century, of mark making processes, some clear others ambiguous. It is in this very ambiguity that I find interest. Years of direct observational drawing has informed my current vision. I still keep a sketchbook replete with direct observational sketches as nature studies contain important visual data and phenomena. However, unplanned automatic drawing in black sumi ink has also inspired my paintings. The simple act of a brush full of achromatic black ink dragged across wet rough paper is a magical process enabling free form fractals to appear. This, if you will, is indirect observation emanating from within. In the words of Chinese painter Wu Guanzhong:

Brush-and-ink is a technique. Brushwork is embodied within technique, technique is not embodied within brushwork, and technique is only a means that serves the artist in the expression of his emotions.

My current Omnis series is a collection of consistent small format paintings in acrylic. I prefer these intimate expressions. Unpredictable forms emerge within continuous patterned brushwork. I use much heavy bodied white paint in a wet-into-wet approach which allows me to both draw and paint simultaneously (I was taught to draw with my brush). I rely on impasto technique painted on Masonite boards. My under painting is full of intense color which becomes tempered by the white over painted strokes and impasto build up. I love the way these brushed in not just brushed on strokes squeeze their way on the Masonite boards. Previously intense color under painting is subordinated by the white paint overlays. These strokes unify the whole painting which nullifies any one area from stealing visual interest from other areas. Thus, achromatic white tempers chromatic intensity. My goal is to achieve a harmonious compositional balance of paint passages drawn/brushed into the surface. Paul Cezanne's words ring true:

Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more the color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also.