Video Graphics
Since the late 1990s, the artist has been creating work that goes beyond the two-dimensional picture plane composition to realize his sense that most of his previous figural images were about movement in space.
Movement is key and can be subtle, as in facial expressions, or dynamic, as in the “Running Figure” series. Color is absent in order to emphasize the action of the animated figures and as a reference to the film form that is being superceded by video in the 21st Century. Again, history - classical, modern and contemporary - is an important motivating undercurrent of the work.
Animating his drawings or, more precisely, making numerous motion drawings to create actual movement in the composition, led the artist to construct narratives, sequences, patterns and textures in a contemporary time-based medium, digital video.
On completion of his first motion drawing, the artist saw the need for sound in the video and began to create digital sound compositions for each of the moving narratives.
His first significant digital video is a 5-minute, 25-second piece entitled “ small gestures/Modes of Escape”. This work has been presented to the public in various venues and can be seen on the artists’s website.
Video Graphics is a term that describes both the sequential drawings made to create the narrative video and the digital prints made from the video sequences themselves. Both stand alone as distinct art works.
Video has made a new kind of collage available to the artist, one with picture, motion and sound as elements. They exist in an abstract time-based setting, a story without words that invites the viewer into the experience to create his or her own narrative.
This is the importance of history and medium in art, to reference the past while taking on the future in the present moment.