My Inspiration-
My work in general illustrates my intrigue with urban life and cultural communication through street art and graffiti that I have personally observed in urban environments throughout the world. My impressions of what are most often universally defined as street art, graffiti, tagging and mark making, began for me several years ago. Actually, in the late 80’s when I started traveling extensively to exotic destinations all over the world. Fast forward to now, all of these years processing the information on some deep level, it is only relatively recently that my art is now focused and defined by this direction. I now realize that my visits to such culturally and historically diverse places on the planet like India, China and Southeast Asia, Vietnam and Cambodia, South Africa, Australia, Turkey, Greece, Mexico and South America; as well as several European and Eastern European countries, have had a deep visceral impact on the direction that has influenced my new paintings. What I’ve discovered and now recognize is that my work suggests a common “thread” – a form of human communication that is universally demonstrated through street art, graffiti, markmaking and tagging that one can see virtually everywhere in the world. My own observations and impressions, from the excavated ancient ruins of Pompeii where history is told through the primitive graphic drawings on the walls of what were presumably at one time lively brothels; to the walls, public spaces and buildings of sophisticated urban areas like Belgrade, Zagreb, Paris, Rome, Venice and of course New York City; to the underground tube stations in the UK and elsewhere; to the cave dwellings of Cappadocia, Turkey; to the boulders on the assent to Table Mountain in South Africa; and more. With all, there is a certain urgency and impulsiveness reflected in this human “mark making”- a need to communicate anger, passion, and other emotions and feelings; a need to create one’s own space and territory- one’s own experience and one’s own branding through tagging and graffiti. While this form of human expression is prevalent worldwide, it is more often I think reviled than appreciated, and periodically erased by local authorities. It is covered up temporarily until new layers of tagging and graffiti inevitably appear again. New colors, new patterns, new language, new text, new graphic images, new scratches, scrawls and symbols reappearing again and again after being white washed over and over. The intrigue and suggestion of artistic composition comes through with each layer as former text, graffiti and images reemerge through the thin layers of cosmetic cover up on weather stressed concrete and urban backdrops.