VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hi everyone, I’ve been asked the question many times “Why the Astronauts” And I wish I had a really simple answer, but I don’t lol…. It all started during the Covid epidemic.
You know, when we started going through lockdown, it was a scary time for all of us. And honestly, I think a lot of artists sit and they try to figure out, “what can I paint, sculpt or what can I produce that’s going to make me money and that people are going to love. What’s going to make me successful as an artist?” And while I think that’s okay and that’s cool, because we all want to be successful, that’s not the reason why I started painting the astronauts.
There is no clear reason why I started painting/sculpting astronauts, I never sat down and said “okay, this is cool, let’s do this because this is going to work and this is going to make money, in fact, it was just life.
What I know today and what I’ve known for a while now is that during the COVID period, with everything that was going on in the world, the vulnerability that we felt at the time, the loss of identity, wearing masks etc, you couldn’t make out who’s who. All of those aspects, and many more, actually subconsciously played on me and that is when I decided to started painting the astronauts.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the theme, I’m fascinated with space and the idea of man going into space. I can’t think of anything else that is more extreme than space travel, but besides that, I today understand that the vulnerability that we felt during COVID, the loss of our identity, the fact that we were disconnected with nature, we weren’t even able to take our dogs out for a walk. I’m a surfer and I couldn’t go surf, we were denied access to nature the connection was lost. We felt vulnerable, people were getting sick and a lot of people died. Thos elements played on my subconscious and for some reason that when I started the astronaut paintings which have been doing really well.
It is a subject matter that I find fascinating, I often use elements from nature like birds, dogs and horses, like this one behind me. I incorporate them into these paintings to re establish the lost relationship with nature.
What I also love about it is the two elements are so contrasting.
And then I also started adding some pop culture elements just to have fun with it. What I love about the astronaut theme is that it allows me to do things that I haven’t been able to do with my portraits. Most people know me or got to know me when I started doing my larger expressive portraits about almost 14 years ago, and that’s how my career started. And then all of a sudden, Im now doing something completely different.
I’m a highly creative person, and I’ve done some nudes, portraits and figurative work. What the astronaut theme is allowing me to do is also sculpt, I am not a sculptor and Im teaching myself, still learning but really enjoying it. I really love working in three dimensions. Its amazing that you can view something from so many different angles and as soon as you turn it just a little everything changes. The astronaut theme allows me sculpt which I do in bursts, I can put wings on someone’s back, or on my sculptures’ back. My first sculpture was based on my painting “Trust,” which has the astronaut with the arrow in the back and the bird. I’m working on my second piece, and it’s taking forever because I’m really doing it in my spare time because painting still keeps me really busy.
So, bottom line, this video is about why I did the astronauts, and now you know. There is no clear reason why the reason is, it was subconscious.
I really thank you all for continuing to follow me, follow my career and my work. There’s exciting new things coming, I’m doing some new paintings that I believe will raise my work to a whole new level, these are very demanding and challenging works where im forced to learn things that I haven’t know before, its very exciting and is important for me as an artist to progress. I’ve been working for the last month and a half on two new pieces, which I will be posting soon. Thank you everyone for you continued support and your continued encouragement. I hope you continue to enjoy my work and that this video helps with an explanation.
Thank you.
