Any art product worth showing is a product of sweat, nail-biting, and an unswerving commitment to artistic integrity, especially when you hope to create a strikingly beautiful art product from ecologically and creatively challenging materials.
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Art product and maintaining integrity as an artist.
Your attitude guides how you work with your materials. I have been in exhibitions the world over where I have shown next to artists who have simply poured their piles of rubbish onto the floor. I have witnessed artists hoping to get away with dramatic statements about the environment and ecology by simply grossing out the viewing audience, making hard-hitting abrupt and blunt comments, and using lazy forms of expression to masquerade as art. It is more difficult to bring the necessary amount of artistic judgment, expertise, attention to detail and aesthetic sensibility to a project using recycled objects. Again and again I experience enormous difficulty creating a particular piece of work, only to destroy it and start again. My integrity forces me to finish only when the work resonates as a truly complete work of art.
It is my intention to create something of beauty when making art, even when creating prints, sculptures, assemblages or paintings out of or inspired by relatively challenging materials such as found plastics, recycled plastic bags and recycled left over roadside materials. I even seek beauty in the very same paintings that depict the urgency and dread surrounding our current environmental predicament and ecological disasters.
To create something of beauty at any given point in time requires of an artist a great deal of honesty and integrity.
