Ian Artist Statement

NOTES ON PAINTING

I have always understood painting to be speculative – a language of inquiry. While contemporary artists are absorbing an expanding range of new media, painting continues to provide a resilient vehicle with which to explore the evolving boundaries of experience. The desire to see beyond the limits of the known propels many endeavors, but within this overreaching human curiosity there is a compulsion to which painting provides specific access. This is the desire to fully experience the present – to disengage from memory of the past, as well as preconceptions of the future. It is the compulsion to reflect, as directly as possible, the conditions of immediate experience.

What interests me about experience in the present is its complexity. Within the diversity of the contemporary situation, traditional dialectics seem inadequate. It seems necessary to find a dynamic equilibrium in which multiple conflicting voices may find articulation and clarity. This pursuit might be viewed as idealistic, or even counter-productive if one’s purpose is reductive. If it is idealistic, it is an idealism that accepts constantly shifting, temporary resolutions. Mostly, however, this pursuit seeks to create a context in which complexity and diversity may thrive and provide a fertile ground for the evolution of ideas and action.

Working on large-scale, mixed media paintings, the expansive surfaces allow me to discover a visual syntax that supports diverse, often opposing, pictorial languages in a dialog that welcomes both traditional and contemporary forms. Each painting evolves according to the needs of the dialog and the process of choreographing some sort of precarious equilibrium between the languages. What fuels the paintings and determines their content are the ways in which diverse pictorial vocabularies collide and merge to articulate the increasingly complex and contradictory voices of a pluralistic present. Ultimately, the paintings acknowledge an abiding faith in the constructive role of the creative imagination and its ability to find unexpected points of correspondence and resolution beyond the reach of reason and logic.

The decision to continue to paint, and to reveal experience in the present, stems in part from the desire to resist the cooption of identity by an increasingly corporate and administered international media culture. The fact that I am a product of, and a participant in this culture, ensures the absurdity of this resistance. Nonetheless, resistance seems to be an effective means by which to limit the ability of a media determined culture to render experience banal. It may be the only method to protect the capacity to be surprised and excited by what is. That capacity may be one of the few remaining measures of an individual’s freedom.

 

IAN HARVEY

Sacramento, January 2024