Inspirations: Bright Colors, Clean Lines

A brief list of things I like in artwork:  Bright colors, sharp lines, identifiable objects, juxtaposition, reciprocity, contrast, odd angles and perspectives, and a distorted reality.

My first realization that art could impact on one's psyche came from, of all things, a T-shirt.  I clearly remember being ten years old and in the shopping mall with my mother.  I remember pointing at a random stranger's T-shirt and telling my mom that I thought it was cool because it had melting clocks on it.  My mother told me it was a famous painting by Dali and that I should check the encyclopedia at school because she thought he had done several paintings like that.

Reading about Dali opened a door for me.  I began looking at books of famous paintings in the county library, wondering about the people who had made them and why I immediately liked some and thought of others as 'just ok'.  I realized quickly that I had little use for the realists or the bizarrely abstract.  I found myself drawn to Dali, Van Gogh, Register, Lichtenstein, and Lempicka.  Reading about them lead to other forms of art and other artists like Escher and Weston.

By the time I graduated from high school I was not thinking about art very much anymore.  I was content to take pictures and cited my influences as the photojournalists and candid street photographers from Life and National Geographic magazines.

It was not until I began painting, at almost thirty, that I really began questioning my assumptions about art and my own tastes in paintings that I started to look for influences - for artists whose work I could learn from or who had expressed something similar to what I wanted to say.

Thank God for the internet.

Searching for new things to like led me to Coop and to Kozyndan, Murakami and Frauenfelder, while reminding me of things I had liked once but forgotten: R Crumb and Dave McKean, not to mention the host of comic book artists I had loved in high school, like Dave Sim and Alex Ross.

And all of these are my influences.  They inform the colors I choose and the design of my paintings.  The diverse body of work represented by all the names listed above reminds me of what can be imagined can be painted; it frees me from every having to have a consistent, single style.

But my greatest inspiration comes from one single individual:  Charles Addams.

Addams was a cartoonist, best known for creating the Addams family, and though he did not often paint, he was capable of producing stunning watercolors when he chose to.  Addams felt that, in his cartoons, if he needed some kind of caption, or dialogue, he had somehow failed; he felt that his best cartoons are those that needed no explanation, no witty comment, but conveyed the entire story in the puzzled look on a little girls face when her string of paper dolls contained an extra leg or when a little boy was smiling triumphantly at the collection of warning signs decorating his bedroom.

Bright colors, clean lines, weird juxtapositions:  In any painting, cartoon, drawing, or doodle I do, this is the thought that stays with me - How do I tell this story?  This is my inspiration.