ARTIST STATEMENT: ON FORM, CONTENT,  and  VIEWPOINT

I am driven to make art on three fronts.

Before anything else, I am simply compelled to be making images, images that are fun to draw, collage, print and paint, the images that amuse me and intrigue me. There are the art fundamentals such as mark, shape, color, surface, composition, and the way it all comes together as style.  (Or, in the case of postmodernism - many styles and/or no original style at all.  All the permission that is given by postmodernism to mix pictorial elements of history and defiantly “appropriate” images that once were artistically sacrosanct becomes an irresistible resource.)  It is the love of juggling the formal properties in art and the desire to see if I can reconcile them in one work. This most basic challenge of picture making seems to be innate and, ironically, I am at peace while I am “wrestling” with it.

And, there are those themes and subjects that obsess me because they cannot be neatly stated, easily categorized, nor reduced to a simplistic dichotomy of good/evil, male/female or life/death.  These are the unanswerable questions that have persisted since childhood, concerns that have arisen from personal experiences, the issues that dictate my reading: questions about why we are here, why we fight, what we fight about, the play between male and female, what is just, what is destiny, what is truth. In certain bodies of work I have focused on such specific themes as death as a cultural ritual, or boxing as a metaphor for the struggle of the underdog. Themes from earlier series recur frequently in the images I continue to use.  Yet I find myself now engaged in a broad look at the worldviews that have dictated cultural behaviors, human achievement and human folly.

Finally, I have a sense of the artist as a civil agitator who stimulates socio-political dialogue. In the classroom, both as student and teacher, I fall naturally into the role of devil’s advocate.  I would be dreadfully disappointed to think I was creating a lovely picture that would decorate the wall without raising a question or an eyebrow. As a provocateur, I am happy to introduce questions even when I cannot provide answers.  I hope to do this with a little irony, satire and good humor applied to serious matters.

Erin Goodwin-Guerrero   2006