No. 1 Print

Hello. I'm Leo Wyatt. I'm a poet & a painter. I've worked in retail, construction, grocery, & most recently, taught rhetoric at the University of Iowa. I'm trying to make works that take the top of your head off , that drive a burning sabre through a frozen heart . They are disturbed & made by wave sound by atmosphere & rarely approach a response that cld be called musical. If they are felt as such, that's more than one cld hope for. Many technics here are borrowed from construction & labor trades—I fabricate the backing support & frames, & paint on sanded plywood, hardboard or MDF, gypsum or sheet rock, cement board, & canvas. I use joint compound, caulk, gel, acrylic emulsions, alcohol & paint markers, charcoal & graphite, wax pens, spray paint, vinyl adhesives, wallpaper, fabric, computer components, tar, oil pastels, & oil paints. I use joint knives, putty knives, silicone tools, brushes, bottles, squeegee-like implements, palette knives, bristled objects, & more brushes. Because I lack technical & formal skills, the works suffer from both an historical myopia, an ignorance of the contemporary global art market, an absence of art world networks, & primarily from conceptual & technical planning & execution. This is an ongoing process, tho I'm wary of anything that stinks of re-education. I want the paintings to f{x} as offerings. I want the paintings to impossibly transfer their kinetics & molecularities unto the viewer, making possible, from their frozen crypt, a heightened attention & quietude in a viewer. Often the overproduction in them threatens the viewer with implosion, but the paintings are ferocious in their idiocy & dumb in their serious implacable desire to find the other, as maybe a postcard from posthumous source. The work, both the poems & the paintings, suffer from this romantic urge, from this leukemia of communication. They are unsystematic primitive waste excess their logorrhea is Whitmanian & Millerian. They are made from the bowels of hyperreality & by the remnants of the social once processed by capital, which is me.