Artist Statement

My paintings are about being in this world at this time. For me this means living in the built environment most of the time, and that is the proximate subject depicted in most of my recent representational works. I make paintings of commercial and street signs, utility poles, buildings, vehicles, and other elements of our environment partly because these are so ubiquitous and familiar that we tend to take their presence for granted even as we use them in our day-to-day lives. Signs guide us to our destinations or indicate where we can obtain goods and services, while the core infrastructure represented by utility poles makes possible the online world on which we have come to depend.

Our built environment and the ways we interact with it are constantly being transformed. This ongoing transition to new and different ways of living is being documented in remarkable detail using new media as well as old media. My paintings are a part of that dialogue. New media are wonderful in many ways but are often ephemeral, volatile, subject to change, and so voluminous as to be overwhelming. A painting, on the other hand, has a lasting physical presence. There's nothing quite like good old-fashioned oil paint to capture the now for the ages. To me, these paintings are rich in allusions and metaphors relating to our civilization and the connections between us. That said, my own primary interest is more painterly. Regardless of the proximate subject, my paintings are explorations of the relationships between light and shadow, figure and ground, color and space. Ultimately, I seek to create objects that are capable of evoking an emotional response. Their physical properties, as well as the allusions and metaphors, 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