My whole purpose of taking on miniature painting was to break the tradition, to experiment with it, to find new ways of making meaning, to question the relevance of it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.
I had tried painting, mostly to give myself a greater appreciation of the craft and to inform how I looked at paintings. That led to collaging some of the work I had done on paper, and I found myself mixing in found pieces as well.
Seriously, I wanted to be an artist because I saw that it meant endless possibilities. I came from a badly managed family background, so art was a way of reinventing myself.
At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.
I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.
It's helpful for me to get ideas - the physical action of painting. Sometimes it frees up your writer brain. It's nice for me now that the writing has become a serious career that painting can become more like a hobby.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Painters hate having to explain what their work is about. They always say, 'It's whatever you want it to be' - because I think that's their intention, to connect with each person's subconscious, and not to try and dictate.
I'm not the kind of artist who has an idea and then carries it out; it's more like I find what the idea was through doing the paintings.
The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.
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