Artist Statement

My paintings are about living in a mostly human-built environment. They are part of an ongoing dialogue about constant change in our world and our relationships with it. I choose the old medium of painting over ephemeral new media, favoring the former's inherent simplicity, lasting physical presence, and distinct individuality.

I invest these paintings with allusions and metaphors, some more subtle than others. Each has a narrative element as well, which may or may not be readily apparent. I approach a painting as a kind of one-frame movie, or one-page story, or perhaps a poem.

I seek to create paintings capable of evoking an emotional response. Their physical properties and less tangible aspects together support that aim.
 

My recent abstract paintings belong to a series I've been working on for over a decade. Their stylistic precursors date back to the early '80s, most notably a vocabulary of forms I developed in making hundreds of drawings on paper napkins. The central themes are ambiguity and play. The forms have no overt models in the real world, yet they frequently resemble objects. The forms lack any shading to suggest 3-dimensional shape. Thus, any impression of depth comes from the contrasting colors, the contours of the forms, and their relationship to each other and to the background. The absence of real-world references also introduces ambiguity about scale; the forms could be any size from microscopic to monumental. The viewer is drawn in by the lively colors, then engages in puzzling over what the forms might represent, their scale, and the depth of the picture plane. In this way, the fun of making these paintings is shared with the viewer.

Featured in the premiere issue of ArtSync: The Art Magazine of North Carolina

Available March 2, 2009

Selected exhibitions

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© Bruce G. Mitchell