On Well Crafted Space

"Like Dr. Cornell West “I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane, that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency and a mastery of craft.” 

This work is my most personal and developed to date and from the initial responses It sounds like it’s pretty decent too. Which makes me happy. For me, one benefit of aging is in seeing my craft develop. As I barrel toward the inevitable I do so with the confidence that my ideas, my hand and knowledge of color grow stronger. 

This work extends previous inquiries of the act of painting and looking at paintings in an attempt at resolving certain social, cultural and historical questions in the language of picture form. First in my own mind and second as objects that help facilitate a joint creation of meaning.

My painting process involves a range of approaches to the application of paint from free hand to stenciling. I construct images largely from memory in order to create altogether new, spaces for sharing stories, dialogue and for critical reflection. That is to say I welcome a very wide range of responses and cherish the opportunity to talk with folks about these responses.

Implicit in this dialectic are philosophical questions of experience both personal and social. I am more concerned with asking productive questions inspiring dialogue than providing easy solutions, now don’t get me wrong as many of you know I have plenty of solutions to a myriad of challenges but — it is a more elegant if not productive solution if it is arrived at collectively and ideally collaboratively. 

Does that mean I expect my work to solve global warming or the migrant crisis, or any other specific social challenge? No, the efficacy of the work lies in its inspiration to conversation, conversation that hopefully inspires critical self reflection, which according to Dr. Cornell West is the only true path to positive, productive social change. Or, at the very least I hope to offer some sort of visually uplifting respite.

My response or argument is formed as I mine Aesthetic histories of cultures and sub cultures from my lived experience, I’m looking for they’re ability to inspire a recall of personal historical and politically relevant narratives and thus the genesis of the compositions and symbols therein. 

These Symbols are employed for their openness or lack of fixed meaning to interact in seemingly banal ways pictorially speaking. So in one sense an orchid can just be a flower, a moment of color within a set of colors coming together to create the illusion of a room or it can be something more specific a marker hinting at a specific political conversation about home as it relates to cultural migration. The paintings are seething with potential energy only to be released as we come together in reflection.

And, While I am interested in specific narratives I am not interested in advancing one specific narrative. Kinship with or ownership of parts of the narrative as the audience, that is to say you guys, perceive it is a way to create that safe space for critical self reflection and at the least hopefully it inspires y’all to then open up and share. Creating a productive type of dialogue that has the ability to attempt a resolutions of previously stated questions and at the very least some sort of resonance.

Subverting systems is a very important endeavor because it tests and keeps honest the systems that guide our lives. So the subverting of linear perspective in my work for instance, becomes a metaphorical subversion of other systems as a practice of resistance with an eye towards Resilience. For this resistance, subversion and this impulse to speak truth to power are me and they have been for quite some time.

Yet, For the longest time art making was a way of staving off the existential discomfort, anguish if you want to get dramatic about it, about who I was in the world. So, my growth as an artist has been about figuring out how to start with myself while not making it just about myself. As someone who found themselves constantly between and never fully in one camp or another. Too brown for the white kids and too white for the brown kids, this dichotomy rooted in the border milieu I was raised in, is embedded in my dna and expressed in architectural terms with paint. Utilizing the postwar domestic architectural advent of the glass wall and the type open concept available through post and beam construction, I distinctly make the reading of the space in my paintings not immediate. 

Are we in fact inside or out? I believe that In certain ways all of us are both in and out and I offer this work as a gesture of celebration of the beauty in that idea."

- Erik Parra on his practice, 2023