BFF_053

I am an artist. I am a 34 year old, male, Caucasian, heterosexual, of middle-class Roman Catholic upbringing,  raised without major scandals or hardships in the Cleveland suburb of Wickliffe Ohio,  nestled in the dominant Earth superpower of The United States of America. This privileged foundation and cultural position greatly enables my excessive introversion. I intuit my way through art creation; my consciousness silenced in a wordless mental state. I use the phrase "the work creates itself" to imply a reactionary relationship to the present stage of process. This reactionary state is an open door to motivations from beyond consciousness. I only understand potential meaning of creation after or while I create. I am at once artist and audience. Similarly, when speaking, I often do not comprehend my words until the sound moves the air. This mental state is not something that I am imprisoned to, but an aspect of our human potential I choose to nurture and attempt to embody. I sense that social culture inadvertently silences more of our human potential than it enables. An individual mind is capable of infinite potentials that are not acceptable within the narrow scope of this culture that surrounds us. We can not exercise our individuality within culture, rather, culture exorcises the individuality out of us. My admittedly romanticized view of culture's role as primarily enforcing conformity,  functions as opposition to the cultural judge that ambushes us all from within, the "super-ego". I actively romanticize my subjective view of external "reality" as a means of controlling undesirable aspects of my psyche. As the inverse of the way dreams fantastically codify the reality of the irrational functions of the psyche,  we can fantastically codify reality back into our psyche to control of it's irrational functions. My art practice attempts to have this type of symbiotic relationship with my psyche. I externalize my psyche like dreaming through my hands, to access the psyche beyond consciousness, and I react to what comes forth by adding to it, to feed back into the psyche's depths. My personal self-refining process finds parallels in what Carl Gustav Jung referred to as "active imagination“. It is not surprising that my art practice does not reap "saleable" items that are desirable to others. Those who value my work, value a sublime glimpse in to the depth of a psyche.