Horror movies and Van Gogh

I have little to no press concerning my work, so I put together a little press release (only my second ever) for my upcoming show and got this sweet little blurb in the online version of the Portland Mercury:

"New paintings from an artist who's been haunting the local scene for a decade. His paintings fall somewhere between a horror movie backdrop and Vincent Van Gogh, playing with light on starry, shadowy nights."

I like it.

Narrative Art

(I jotted this down a couple weeks ago on some scrap paper while painting):

"I am and always will be, unapologetically, a narrative artist. Life itself is an unfolding narrative event. Those who think story telling is beneath the dignity of visual art have lost touch with it’s original purpose."

Some art critics are dismissive of narrative art, presumably because they are intellectually stuck in the pretentious post-modern mid-twentieth century. Or they think that the effort to imply a story through art is some kind of a cop-out of artistic intention. I should think that at least one of the primary goals of any verbal story teller is to create images in the mind of the listener or reader. Just so, one of my goals as an image maker is to create stories in the mind of the viewer. Nothing is more vital than story-telling. Stories are how we derive meaning.