Artist Statement

My work is derived from a subjective interpretation of my relationship to other art, media, pattern and shape.  It is an attempt to show the effects on me both aesthetically, and as a compilation of influences on my life and consciousness.  It includes works I have witnessed in person, in public spaces, and from my immediate environment.  This creative process almost always begins by taking a photographic image of the subject.  I have spent over twenty years developing my aesthetic, first with a mechanical camera and darkroom, and now using modern digital manipulation.  I came to art later in life through the chemical process of image making when the digital equivalent was still technically inferior.  These beginnings have given me a method of seeing my subjects through a more deliberate act of framing a shot.  This process allows a greater exploration of the subject’s potentialities than had my compositional tastes come to fruition using current digital cameras. I was highly influenced by the processes of toning and monochromatic print making prior to the widespread development of digital imaging. 

My paintings reflect a mixture of techniques used to achieve texture.  My color choices declare an intention and force and convulse towards movement and energy without restraint.   I like to integrate multiple mediums into my canvases so that they may take on an existence apart from my contributions. 

Ultimately, I seek to reach into the ever-moving ocean of symbol and image and form and take hold of an idea—pull it away from the void so that the transient nature of its intensity can be preserved with a hope that my interactions with it will change me forever in some way.  I need the subject to consume and direct me like a point of light in a darkening sky.  I hope to shape its transience into to something permanent, something solid, so that the feelings it has stirred will be allowed to live on for a little longer, so that they might linger over time and infuse themselves into who I hope to become someday—someone different, someone more worthy of the immeasurable awe of everything around me.   

Beauty is often fleeting, but moments spent in its presence have a certain power that cannot be easily expressed—words offer so little clarity under these circumstances.   My work is a vibrant expression of all the joy, pain, fear and glory I see in this world.  My hope is that it will mean as much to the people who acquire it as it has to me during the process of its creation. 

G. Behan

2024