I am not overly concerned with titling my works, as you can probably tell from titles like, âbufferâ, âcurtainâ, âembraceâ⦠it is after all primarily a visual experience that prompts a dialogue with the work. My painting âPeace, Joy ânâ Pancakesâ which depicts something similar to the âDeepwater Horizonâ tragedy, may be an exception, the title translated from a German tongue-in-cheek saying, plays on the fact that everything is far from being alright. An image I create often relies on its own masked ambiguity to be read openly. The images strength in the public space, is its luxury of not being designed first and foremost for the hard sell. It serves me right when I hear people saying to their kids, âoh look, astronautsâ, and I am thinking, âthey are NOT bloody astronautsâ. This sort of misinterpretation of an image such as in âThe Listâ, in which a masked and hazmat suited figure gives instructions over a walkie-talkie, turn out to be a jotted shopping list of dandruff shampoo and chocolate etc, expose our own media tainted association of fear and paranoia. It is this sort of shift in an images weight between earnest intention and pathetic weakness that has influenced my portrayal of the human figure. Ideas for my poses often stem from other painters works such as Caspar David Friedrichâs âThe wanderer above the sea of fogâ 1818 or Courbetâs âBonjour, Monsieur Courbet!â 1854 or Picassoâs âEmbraceâ 1903. It is practically impossible to portray a standing figure that doesnât relate to some previously documented artwork. I am not possessed with the want for âModern solutionsâ as an excuse to still be making figurative painting, but stenciling is and has become for me a practical method in creating handmade, painted reproductions from my photographs. Their creation in the studio, enable the time-consuming detail to be transported and reproduced relatively quickly on virtually any surface due to the reliability and drying time of spray paint. With site specific work, if there is no opportunity to paint a background, my main concern is to create an immediate relationship with the figure, one in which itâs placement creates an event, a dialogue. The life-sized figure opens an immediate channel of exchange due to its own relative proportion to the viewer and due to the stencils scale allows the tool of the spray can to leave its characteristics of gestural dust or fill in the stencil, unlike the more mechanical flat pull of a silkscreen. At the time of creating the images of the maintenance workers Berlin and the area I live in was under going a massive renovation spurt, I felt as if they needed to be documented, to also briefly become part of the changing city. My choice of image hopefully retain a collective sense of who we are and how we are affected by the times we live in.
