What do you aim to say by the themes in your art?

​

Though I'd like to say that my work contains messages about the mess we've made of our world and our society by depending so heavily on cars, my work is a process, I use car parts and borrow from car related patterns (parking lots, etc) because I hope I am creating something benign from something malignant. I work by response eschewing narrative and representation which is something of a conundrum, since much of work is not obviously made from or reflective of cars. Overall, I feel like there's too much statement and not enough feeling in a lot of art today.

Where does your inspiration come from?

​

I use the response process to develop my work. I let my inspiration flow from the materials I'm working with focusing the feeling and direction by sensing what wants to come into being. There are minor dead-ends at points in the process and it does tend to be labour intensive.

Do you have any experiences that have impacted your art?

 

My work is always impacted by what I am discovering. I raid transmission shops and find shapes and patterns that lead me in new directions. At one point, I realized that many transmission and clutch parts are perfect for block printing. Printing is now one of the processes I use in creating my work.

Do you feel your art challenges existing barriers?

​

Actually, the barrier I do feel my work challenges is that head/heart dichotomy. I kind of worship kids' art—its directness, use of colour and subjectivity—and seek to emulate those qualities with an adult and trained eye. As in many other areas, academia has a stranglehold on art requiring explanations and structure. The response process does not produce a coherent “body” of work, it goes where it wants to go and leaves a litter of partial directions in its wake. Currently, I feel I'm barely able to keep up with these multiple directions. What's nice though, is I never have that sense that many suffer from working from an idea/image, that their work isn't quite capturing the image/ideal. I'm always working toward something that doesn't yet exist.

 What are your long-term artistic goals?

​

Don't have any, I'm just following that mirage that's trying to gain substance. More sales would be nice.

 What advice do you have for aspiring artists?

 

Find some other way to make money. Most likely you're not going to make enough selling art to pay for rice and beans. I'd phrase this another way, “What advice would you give to professional artists? My answer, do all you can to help aspiring artists (whose work you like) get exposure. While I'm not going to say I ever made enough money doing this, I had a sideline running workshops printing t-shirts with car parts and tires. What I discovered, as I enjoyed creating spaces for other people to create in and that was very satisfying,