Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Speed is Everything, These Days

I entered art school with starry-eyed dreams of animation and comic book art. This was and still is very common for students of my generation and younger. I came from the first generation fully raised on a combination of television and home video games. Before we even entered school we played Intellivision and Atari 2600 at home. Once we entered school we traded Commodore 64 games via floppy disks and rented Nintendo games at the local video store. The idea of piracy was cool and I learned to “hack” software on the Commodore and buy “hot” Nintendo games from Jimmy Jones under the stairwell at the Jr. High for $5 each. I even recall trading copies of movies like “Beverly Hills Cop 2” with Michael Tucker, in the 7th grade.

Early in college, I outgrew my infatuation with comic-art, although I believe my style will always show a bit of its influence. I have more to say with my work than I feel can come across in a few humorous anecdotes or short films. I’m not discrediting others that work in that vein – I’m just saying it’s not for me.

Having said all that, I do believe that my “need” to work as an action painter comes more from an actual hands-on video-game-culture youth of fulfilling immediate satisfaction as opposed to an infatuation with Pollock via stories and pictures. I steal artistic influence from art history and contemporaries not because Picasso said it was alright, but rather because I practiced liberating electronic media in my youth. I wonder how much of the modern/abstract art movement was spurred by the advance of photography due to the need to “not compete against the new technological realism” and how much was an attempt to just find satisfaction while “speeding-up” the process of making art by hand? – DN

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