Artists Statement

My passion is to transform the traditional canvas support paradigm in Art. This consumes my development as an artist. I work to create new and exciting proto types that reflect the inherent quality of diverse shapes in nature.

I would like canvas supports to be more flexible and organic and spontaneously engaged not always a standard and rigid object for each and every artwork. I prefer my canvases to suggest fragmentation within the shape and the ability to turn, twist and go beyond the four sided enclosure of a rectangle. I see the shape of the canvas as an addition to the ideal of liberating the artist from status quo practice that has been handed down throughout the ages and seldom questioned. While Cezanne is usually credited with being the first artist to use shapes to represent nature on rectangle formats I’d like to create shapes out of formats themselves those that mirror the organic diversity in nature.

I see the triangle as the stepchild of shapes in the universal scheme of painting that exists. Yet our visual world is filled with triangles in all our cities, buildings, traffic signs etc. We need these triangles to fulfill our lives, complete our society. It is only in painting the triangle has ultimately been neglected due to the hegemony of the rectangle.

When I see a beautiful landscape I see the variety of different shapes not a monotonous display of repetition.

I try to capture this diversity of expression in “The Modular Triangular System.” I work to expand its concept, its range and depth. I feel the Rectangular System of Art has existed for centuries and will continue to exist with or without my input due to the millions of artists before me and those who will come after me. This is only foreseeable as we are introduced to the rectangle from our early childhood in books, papers and the very sketch books we later use as art students.

Still my work is instilled with this belief that triangles in combination can achieve certain inherent dynamics that rectangles will always be unable to achieve no matter how great the artist. Once these visual secrets are unlocked within the creative mind there is no limit to the triangles potential.

I am basically an artist trying to change the standard ways of painting on canvas.  I have already discovered many new formats along my own artistic path. My inspirational fountainhead has been cultural heritage references such as the triangular-shaped Taino zemi, some literally almost unknown to the outside world, from the Caribbean where I was born on the tiny island of St. Croix.

April 2011