Hanoi, Hotel View Painting

I taught myself to draw and paint in the cafes of Austin, Texas, spending hours every day filling up sketchbooks with drawings of patrons. When I went off to art school I decided to study printmaking instead: painting was something I could learn on my own. From printmaking I gained an appreciation for the graphic: flat areas of color, possibly creating the illusion of space, perhaps denying it. This tension between the flat surface and the appearance of depth fascinates me: I enjoy playing with it. To that end I primarily work with acrylic gouache: it’s matte, opaque, and waterproof (which means I can change my mind a lot.) I also started learning about color theory: did you know that the CMYK process that is the heart of modern commercial lithography was inspired by the experiments of Georges Seurat and his ideas about the “optical mix,” colors mixing in the eye? Did you know that the red-yellow-blue color model taught in schools is wrong? That the primaries are actually cyan, yellow, and magenta? One of my biggest influences has been Adobe: Photoshop and Illustrator, the Posterize filter and the clean edges of vector art. Before I discovered cheap Chinese airbrushes, I tried to make hard edged, flat area of color with origami paper: I’ve got about 5 pounds of it in an accordion folder, organized by color. I still love to work that way, but airbrush is an easier way to achieve similar effects. Picasso and Braque did the same when they shifted from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism. But I don’t want to make digital art, even though it would be so easy. I like getting my hands dirty too much, the way the colors mix in the cup of my airbrush, the inadvertent drips and spatters, the happy accidents. Moreover, I like knowing that I’ve created something unique, a one of a kind object that resists reproduction. Lately I’ve been incorporating fluorescent pigments, metallic colors, and glow in the dark powders. A computer screen or a printed reproduction can’t do them justice. I only want to convey the beauty I see in this world, to communicate the joy I feel when catching glimpse of some overlooked gorgeousness in the mundane.