Thanks
for your e-mail. First, I must compliment you on your extraordinary good taste
and intellectual insight. (Ha- ha) Seriously, it's my pleasure to help out in
any way that I can. After a quick check of my dictionary I must say that my
work and the ideas that I use to create the work fit in with the notion of adornment
etc.
Let me start with a brief spin through recent art history. With the beginning
of the Modern era, lets say 1900, there were a lot of new ideas evolving that
were reactions against current thought. In painting they were the Fauves, the
Cubists, the Futurists and so on. One aspect of these developments was the removal
of what was perceived to be unnecessary stuff i.e.. myth, ornament, sentimentality.
By removing these things the artist was then able to concentrate on the basic
elements of picture making which are line, form, color,composition. As modernism
continued artists kept removing more and more to distill things down to their
essence. Finally in the late sixties with Minimalism, everything had been emptied
out of art and all that was left was an empty box. That was when I came on the
scene. Like any bad boy or artist I revolted against what was the accepted standard.
As art had been stripped down to nothing, I was able to scavenge the junk heap
of art history and take what suited my purposes.
About the same time there arose an art movement here in New York, called Pattern Decorative. These artists were using a lot of things as influences like oriental carpets, William Morris wallpaper designs, even the minimalist grid. They were not afraid to admit that they wanted to make beautiful objects. The use of different kinds of materials also became popular. The idea that art could have a decorative element was no longer taboo. As for my own work I decided to go back to the beginnings of Modernism, to what I consider the font of all modern thought which is Cubism. Just as the major breakthrough in physics was the discovery of the elemental table, which showed that everything was made up of elements each having its own atomic weight, so too Cubism broke down not only the picture plane but the idea of what a picture was or could be. It even brought the idea of the fourth dimention, that is time, in to play. By using the idea that that you could represent not only what the eye saw but what the mind knew to exist the cubists were also the first conceptual artists.
With regard to the ideas of adornment and embellishment, I must also plead guilty to the desire to use irony and humor. I've always believed in contrasts and comparisons to drive home a point. Many of the subjects of my paintings are the downtrodden or mundane. There are things in one's day to day life that have become invisible to many people. For an example, the homeless beggar is someone that most people avert their eyes from, but put a picture of one in a frame that is fit for Louis XIV and perhaps the next time you see one on the street, you may be challenged to see the noble humanity that is there.
From a purely technical point, I like to use brilliant materials like mirror, gold leaf, colored glass, and intense color as a way of capturing attention and hopefully of getting the work to stick in the memory of the viewer. In the visually overloaded environment that we live in today it's becoming harder and harder to break through to be heard over the howl of the crowd if you will. There is also a craft aspect to the frames. I'm hoping that people will appreciate the time and effort that goes into the fabrication of the frames,again in contrast to the machine made esthetic of much contemporary art.
I hope this rant will be of some use to you. I'll e-mail some new images to you and if you would like more information forward your address and we can mail you a couple of small catalogues.
Thanks for your interest.
LOREN