Artist Statement
When I paint, I try to find a way in to a part of myself and the world around me that is constant, yet often elusive. When I find it, I know it. When I lose it, I know I've lost it. Painting is the work of searching again for what I know is there. Sometimes a painting goes through many incarnations, the surface being completely scraped away, images destroyed, then recreated. During this process, a point is reached where the painting captures a unified moment, where every area and event on the surface of the painting feels connected. It becomes a place where time stops, and one can enter in. An object or place may be intimated by an emerging line, a partial shape, a change of texture, or a juxtaposition of colors, which are made complete in the viewer's mind's eye. There is a sense of random inevitability, which the observer makes whole, where clarity becomes possible. That same visual suggestion will be fulfilled differently in the psyche of every observer, each of whom brings to it a unique collection of experiences and observations, accumulated over a lifetime. The observer completes the image alone, as they need to, in order to make it right and whole for themselves, in order to become aware of their own presence in this moment.
- David Friedman