ARTIST ESSAY
Having said that, though, we must also recognize that beauty need not be found at some vantage far removed from the harsh realities of life. Rather, seeing the beauty in the struggles we face and looking for light in the darkness that can surround us helps us create an understanding of who we are and what we are about. This exercise gets to the heart of the central questions of the painter’s profession: Why does an artist create? Can we truly create a painting if we have nothing to say with it? Are we capable of giving ourselves to something even if we do not fully understand it? These are some of the questions that have been the driving force behind my narratives. As I mentioned, most of my work explores climate change, wars, revolution, poverty, and endangered species. It takes an anti-establishment perspective. I began using my artwork in the late ’80s and early ’90s to confront issues of universal concern. My deep commitment to human rights, social justice, and biodiversity has never swayed. I find strength in civil disobedience. In 1986, at the age of 16, I went to the Civic Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska, to see a man who brought a message of peace, atonement, and human dignity for all through his political activism. His name was Elie Wiesel. He had just won the Nobel Peace Prize and was on a small tour. I listened to this man, who was so humble that he didn’t even want his award. I remember how sad his voice was, and yet also how uplifting. His words would inspire me for the rest of my life. He spoke about teen suicide, and against violence, repression, and racism. He said that it was up to us to be the change we want and need in this world, and that no one would help us. In the early ’90s, I was in a punk industrial band that pushed for social justice in the inner cities. I toured through the Midwest and created visual graphics
for each show that brought awareness to issues I did not see anybody talking about. Inspired by Elie Wiesel, I participated in marches for those who were marginalized. I continue to advocate and attend social justice marches, but now with my children. I want them to understand and take a stand on matters that are important to them and our natural world. In the mid ’90s, I moved to the East Coast and lived in Baltimore, Maryland, during graduate school. My work and activism changed, and I spoke through my paintings about the inequality, racism, and injustice that I witnessed on the streets.
IT IS A MISTAKE, HOWEVER, TO ASSUME THAT THE VIEWING PUBLIC IS COMPLACENT. One of my paintings, Welcome to America, made the front page of the Washington Post on July 14, 1994. It was the first time I realized the power of art. My artwork and the issues I addressed reached a wider audience and served a higher purpose by raising awareness. In 1998, Odd Nerdrum, a fellow painter that I greatly admired, declared that he was no longer an artist, but rather a “kitsch painter.” Disillusioned with modernist ideas that he saw as absurdist and that fostered apathy and ego in artistic expression, Nerdrum embraced his association with the technical skills of the Old Masters and sought to use their trade to render empathy on his canvases. Nerdrum could not have cared less what society
thought of him, and he embraced largescale narratives full of timeless archetypes. I would eventually find my path to Røvik Gård and study with Odd Nerdrum personally. Beyond what he taught me technically, Nerdrum also left me with the lesson that—whether we are called kitsch, grotesque, dark, or low brow—narrative storytellers are painters searching for sentimentality. He showed me that this is an honorable pursuit, and that I should never apologize for being genuine. In a masterpiece, time and place are captured so vividly that a viewer is moved to the moment, to joy or sorrow more than tears. A masterpiece lifts a veil, exposing the heartstrings of life—it allows those heartstrings to resonate and reverberate in the depths of the human condition. In our less than picture perfect world, finding an artist who can draw inspiration from life’s oddities, struggles, and melancholy is rare. Painters who can find meaning in this world’s oppression and also have technical training in narrative storytelling is even more uncommon. Even for the few who possess both, issues showing their work arise because few venues exhibit work labeled “kitsch painting,” “imaginative realism,” or “dark art.” It was around 2000–2005 that my artwork started to shift again. At that time, I would often take my children to the botanical gardens, and I was studying the diversity of plants and insects. On one visit, I was in a huge pollinator section with a variety of butterflies and, all of sudden, they began landing on only my son and daughter. It was a magical moment because I noticed that they were not landing on the adults. I had an idea for a painting that I called Birth of Spring, with butterflies kissing the innocence of youth. The glow depicted in the painting was the love and empathy that came from our natural world. Around this same time, my art started to bring awareness to the monarch popuLITROMAGAZINE,COM | 39
