The meaning behind my art, what inspired it, and what I like about it.
I have written previously about what inspired me to paint the way I do and how my style arose. But I haven’t really talked about the meaning behind each artwork. Or even such basic things as what I like and don’t like about it.
So you may be surprised to learn that I have not studied art formally, but only illustration and graphic design. So I have never attended actual art or anatomy drawing classes or lessons. What I have learned is that it’s much easier to draw individual parts of the human body separately than as a whole, because of placement and proportion. In some of my student illustration projects I drew an ear for example. Or I drew an eye. I drew a heart. I drew lungs. I drew kidneys. That is where some of my influence comes from.
I guess you could say that my art represents the internal conflict I have experienced in my own life so far. It thus represents people who are torn between two separate things they cannot have together at the same time. You cannot live in the city and live in the country at the same time, for instance. You cannot be in two countries or two cities at once. If you like one thing about one place, then you cannot really have something from the other simultaneously. You can export food or music or even a building to somewhere else, but you cannot have your cake and eat it too so to speak. I think travelers can appreciate this more than anybody.
It also represents choices. What might our lives potentially have been if we had made difference choices earlier on? We’ll never truly know. Reflecting too much on this –obsessing about it, having intrusive thoughts– creates much internal conflict. Not letting go of the past. People that worry a lot do not tend to live in the present, they ruminate about the past and future too much.
My first psychologist told be very plainly and directly “you’re a worrier”. That’s why when I practice my art, I feel something in the moment, something therapeutic. My thoughts flow naturally, they come and go. I don’t dwell on things for too long. Psychologists have a term for this: “mindfulness”. The truth is, I have been attending monthly psychologist sessions for the last decade. I also think –I know– that doing something with our hands, moving our bodies, is important. It makes us feel better.
Of course each of us knows what is going on in our own lives. We all have problems. But do we truly know what obstacles and hurdles other people face on a daily basis? Not really. It’s all very hidden away from view. So there is another aspect to my work. Seeing the “internal”, not only the “external”.
People are so focused on outward appearances, design and beauty –the illusion of success– that we forget to look inside of others. People are not just faces and bodies. We sometimes forget that we are biological organisms, an assemblage of organs and body parts. I think the world today has become very superficial. You only have to look at any fashion magazine to see that. As if looks are all that matters, and everything else becomes only secondary.
Worse, people don’t get to know each other anymore. Human connections are becoming ever more fleeting. If you live in a city, nobody knows who you are or what you do. You are essentially anonymous. Staff changes so quickly. People don’t even recognise repeat customers. We live in a faceless corporate world. Depression is widespread and prevalent and our civilisation is facing a looming mental health epidemic, a crisis.
But it’s more than that. I am mainly trying to attempt to do something that has never been done before, to create something “new”. Literally a new style of art. I have intentionally connected organs and other objects “the wrong way”. A doctor or a surgeon would probably laugh. But aren’t we finding out now about the gut-brain axis? Lungs aren’t directly connected to hearts like that, no. But if you stop breathing sooner or later your heart stops too. And if your heart stops pretty soon your lungs stop working also. So is what I have drawn “wrong” as such?
Looking back over some of my artworks now, I have to admit that I’m not even really that “happy” with a lot of them. Perhaps I’m my own biggest critic. I don’t even really ‘like’ the majority of them (overall). I like some parts of some of them. At the moment, I think my best two works are “Mental Anguish” and “Adverse Complexity“. That is why they are priced the highest, because they have a more special meaning to me and they are much more difficult to part with.
I think I went a bit too “out there” into the bizarre and weird with some things, got a bit too creative and carried away with myself. Like the artwork with a capacitor or an integrated circuit in it. I probably would not want hang either of these pieces on my own wall, no.
Regardless, I guess I was attempting to connect the animate with the inanimate, and I don’t think it really ‘worked’. But if you don’t ever try to push the envelope, push the boundary, you’ll never know. So I think it’s better to try and attempt something new, then learn something from it and adapt. So what I try to do nowadays is take from this experience, take the parts I like most, discard what I don’t like, and then once again create something new out of it. This doesn’t always work, because I think that some of my later works are not as good as earlier ones. Perhaps because they now have too many colours, which doesn’t look as harmonious or as balanced anymore, so what I will do in future is to reduce the colour palette once more…
I painted a blue hue melancholy artwork, the one shown above. To try to do something ‘different’ from what I normally do (in the hopes that it might sell). But who wants to feel worse or get into a lower mood when they look at art? They won’t look for long. They’ll quickly look away. I experienced this when I looked at Yosl Bergner’s 1939 self-portrait at the NSW art gallery last week. Because of the green hue, it looks sickly. Yes it’s skillfully painted but I cannot look at it for long or my mood drops.
Shouldn’t my real aim be to get people to look at my art for longer? To increase the average viewing time per artwork? After all, I’m sure that everyone usually wants to feel happier, not sadder, right?
Art should lift people’s mood, not lower it. That’s why my tagline is “elevate with art”. I want to elevate people’s mood. Nobody needs or wants to feel more depressed. I know about depression so I try to listen to my core inner voice on what styles and objects makes me feel better or worse. In knowing what makes us feel sad, we can then avoid that. Of course it’s impossible to be happy all the time. But I want to create artworks that instantly lift people’s spirits.
I want people to walk into a room one day, look at one of my artworks, be totally captivated by it, instantly feel a warm glowy feeling, a bit like falling in love.
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