Artist Statement
My current work incorporates acrylic transfer of xerography, newspapers, maps, digitally modified images, digital printing, drawings, pastels, and other objects combined in various ways with acrylic mediums and paints--yet I am also endeavoring to reinvent for myself what it means to paint.
I am attracted to the poetic, the elusive, the non-sequitur. I am attracted to things that can't easily be put into words. I am attracted to things that cannot be made into images of known things that can easily be put into words.
For me abstraction is not only a means of removing things, it is also a means of adding them; it is a way of overloading, of creating multiple layers of meaning and implication.
I dream of energy as both bound and content, form and gesture, drawing and color, surface and depth.
I delight in subverting a line and turning it into a shape, turning a shape into an outline, and playing in the shifting in-between world where no one thing is purely one thing or unequivocally in front of another, seeking just that flow of endless energy.
If it is sometimes hard to tell where the painted brushstoke begins and the digital manipulation ends, all the better. The image sources may be the gesture of my hand, poured and peeled paint, digital distortions of other paintings, fabrics, fractal generator programs and found objects, or made by moving the images through a scanner, but there they are again, form and gesture, color and line, always new.
Ed Smiley
My current work incorporates acrylic transfer of xerography, newspapers, maps, digitally modified images, digital printing, drawings, pastels, and other objects combined in various ways with acrylic mediums and paints--yet I am also endeavoring to reinvent for myself what it means to paint.
I am attracted to the poetic, the elusive, the non-sequitur. I am attracted to things that can't easily be put into words. I am attracted to things that cannot be made into images of known things that can easily be put into words.
For me abstraction is not only a means of removing things, it is also a means of adding them; it is a way of overloading, of creating multiple layers of meaning and implication.
I dream of energy as both bound and content, form and gesture, drawing and color, surface and depth.
I delight in subverting a line and turning it into a shape, turning a shape into an outline, and playing in the shifting in-between world where no one thing is purely one thing or unequivocally in front of another, seeking just that flow of endless energy.
If it is sometimes hard to tell where the painted brushstoke begins and the digital manipulation ends, all the better. The image sources may be the gesture of my hand, poured and peeled paint, digital distortions of other paintings, fabrics, fractal generator programs and found objects, or made by moving the images through a scanner, but there they are again, form and gesture, color and line, always new.
Ed Smiley
