BEINGEWERT

I’m hesitant to even broach the idea of an artist statement because a) I’m lazy, and b) I guard my ethereal “creative process” with the type of spiritual reverence generally relegated to religious worship; where the mere conscious acknowledgement of it threatens to derail it entirely. It was that very derailment of my creative process in relation to my writing that caused me to take up art making as an artistic expression. As happens to many creative endeavors, the more I learned about the craft of writing directly and disproportionally effected the quality and output of my personal and creative writing. There’s something about the direct and literal aspects of defining why I make art and how I may deem it successful that conflates the act of creatively making. That being said, as I look at this website, where I directly proposition the viewer to “BUY SOME”, I feel the need to address the seemingly perpendicular end points of creativity and commerce. I don’t believe that creatives need to be magicians; that they must operate behind a cloak and refuse to divulge their secrets as if the supply and demand of creative operations correlates to the marketability of their work. You might be thinking that this contradicts my introduction, but I view my “creative process” much different than my “creative operation”. My “creative process” refers to that intangible creative judgment that guides and regulates my aesthetic and expressive choices of creative subjects and concepts. My “creative operations,” however, are what I am eager display. I believe the collage medium, as well the greater assemblage and mixed media, are inherently democratic and more forwardly participatory and inclusive than more traditional visual mediums like painting, drawing and sculpture. Granted, like collage and assemblage, anyone can be a painter or sculptor without having formal training, I see mixed media as a more accessible and emerging form than the latter. When I first began making collage art in earnest it was very much a personal and psychological endeavor, a solution to a self-consciously existential problem. I used collage as a form of directly literal expression. I set out execute an expression with a literal definition that I abused the viewer with. In many ways this was my weaning off of the creative writing process I had developed and attempting to escape. As I continued to labor through collages and experimented with materials, subject matter, concepts and abstraction, ambiguity, and more specifically, how ambiguity relates to the interpretation of art began to expand my creative world. By erring on the side of ambiguity, as opposed to the literal, I began removing my conscious self from my work. Surprisingly, this increased the accessibility of my work to wider audiences and provided a higher conceptual authority to my work. At this point I view my work as highly conceptual. An outsider attempting to democratize an emerging medium to serve the creative and economic needs of the artist, while instilling in the viewer a contemporary challenge to creatively participate themselves. Contemporary art was once described to me as that feeling you get when viewing or experiencing art that you could have created the same work yourself—but didn’t. By placing a single image over a landscape I am urging viewers to do it themselves.