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The artist: oscillating between the ideal and the real


Feeling Out For Something IV, acrylic, oil pastels, ballpoint pens and charcoal on leather, 36 inches by 24 inches, 2020

In conversation with an artist friend, I had this to say: 

"I think as artists we go back and forth between appreciating and visually representing the ideal and the real, and it's good like that. It gives us a wholesome view of the world.

These little things we experience everyday matter. They collectively represent reality and are worth documenting. Then there are the things we experience only in our heads. Abstract thoughts and feelings. These collectively represent the ideal."

The average young person is in a place of looking for ways to get heard, get visible. It's instinctive, this pressing desire to be related with, to be understood. What do we get however? A convoluted twist of feelings and biases that becloud the identity we're trying to project. We have a lot of things to communicate but it is left to the people who really care to connect with us very well to look beyond the trappings of externalities and behold the unspoken words, unchanneled desires and desperation, the textures of our souls, the movements of the aspirations within us.

This piece is the fourth painting in the Feeling Out For Something series which is my own attempt at navigating my morphing reality and abstraction in its intertwined textural planes, as well as an attempt to draft the viewer's attention into the portrayal of those intra-personal relationships between the ideal and the real. In my works I attempt to show how that societal realities are extensions of personal ones.