STATEMENT

For me, painting is about the experience – the physicality of paint and motion – and this physicality informs the work, in which I leave room for multiple interpretations, but also guide the viewer through waypoints as they follow a subjective path determined by their own frame of mind.  In this way, I try to bridge art and life, incorporating relativity and spontaneity, memory and active perception, into the plasticity of paint.  These paintings provide for infinite interpretations, and the ones I consider most successful are the ones which look one way in the morning, and a completely different way at night.  With each stroke, my aim is expressive mark-making, to imbue these canvases with living qualities: dynamism, interconnection, flux, ambiguity.  Above all, I want these paintings to express feelings of freedom, growth and connection.  I want them to be gracious.

Over years, I’ve developed a level of visual familiarity with myself, bringing a certain coherence to a large body of work, but my method, my technique, has always left me free to explore and discover, as I try to give my internal life – my happiness, my energy, my love – an external, visible form.  For the viewer, I hope to be a mirror turned toward their hidden places, offering the opportunity for self-discovery through these windows of paint.

A work is complete when it enables perpetual conversation with the self. I’m interested in creating a universal visual fluency based on sensation and recognition.

Ari Lankin, 2011