PAPER AIRPLANE series
PAPER AIRPLANE Artist's Statement
My PAPER AIRPLANE series of paintings is about us, how we live our lives with our ideas, how we treat our dreams. It might be an itch in the back of mind. A plan we set aside. Maybe an idea that keeps coming back, or one that keeps us going.
I’m a storyteller at heart, so I populate most of my paintings with characters from my imagination. As the empty page reveals each one to me, I can start to find the life in their faces, their stories. But that life never fully happens until you, as the viewer, reach out to the story...like the paper airplanes my characters reach out to, or hold in their hands, or let loose, or just dream about.
The physical tools I’ve used to make these paintings are acrylic paint and alkyd based oils on gessoed canvasses, most ranging in size from 24”x30” to 30”x40” to 54”x42.”
The conceptual tool I’ve found most useful is vujà dé, finding the surprising in the ordinary. It’s helped me explore the gap between the assumption of “nothing” and the experience of “something.” In the paintings, I use a folded bit of paper, easily blown away by the wind or crumpled up for the waste basket, the most clichéd of overworked metaphors, really. Then, I try my damndest to crack open the canvas to reveal the “something” in it.
I find that exploring that gap is a necessary bit of vujà dé to live our lives with the world around us, but most importantly the people, the “others” who populate our assumptions.
Paul M.
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