Artist Statement

Painting is a contemplative and purgative process. Experience, like food, is broken down into fragments of meaning and reconstituted in layers of paint. Within each unfolding narrative, I am able to assume various character identities and observe the resulting outcomes in order to help identify which experiences have been nutritive or toxic in my life. It is through this contemplative catharsis in paint that I am able find guidance or the resolve to strip destructive experiences of their power, allowing both to begin working their gifts of transformation in my life.

A painting begins as protean washes of color are applied to the bare canvas where they begin coaxing all experience, thought, and feeling towards full visual consciousness by coalescing into objective form. A battle ensues as the corporeal qualities of paint excite a rich and unbridled dialogue between idea and this provocatively nascent imagery. The painting process winds its way along additive and subtractive paths. Passages are gesturally plowed onto the surface or wiped, scraped, and even sanded out, leaving in some cases the palimpsest of failures that survive towards the end as unseen guides in the developing context of the visual narrative. At the outcome, it is the quality of the engagement between myself and the painting that I hope is apparent. It is here that I hope its beautiful, bruised, and embattled surface convinces not just as alluring illusion or quirky narrative, but as a living history of something that has been fought over—something that has been freed or bound in paint at a transforming cost.

I therefore take out of the studio what I learn about myself there, applying it as best I can to my ever-expanding experience. New experience is then funneled through the imagery it creates, continuing the reciprocal relationship between my life inside and outside of the paintings. My work is motivated by the desire to both maintain and develop the honesty and intimacy of this dialogue.

Jeff Krantz 2014