Farrell Brickhouse

Artist Statement 2010
For me art is a personal odyssey. A vehicle to carry me forward and find some deeper unity in what is happening in and around me. Art is a slow burn, working its gift on individuals. It is based on memories arrested in liquid space. I want my paintings to be a haunted living presence that reveals to the viewer passion, intellect, mystery and that changes with each day’s new light. My work is experiential, non-formulaic. Painting is a belief system that asks as Borges stated, “ a momentary act of faith that reality is inferred from events not reasonings. That theories are nothing but stimuli: that the finished work frequently ignors and even contradicts them.” We all do that which is a thrill to us. The artistry is in portraying the depths of one’s soul. Where has one’s art lead them to? What’s to be shared? One of arts chief functions is to resist the denaturing forces that are always present, those things that would take away our transcendent possibilities and turn us into stereotyped beings. Art is not the production of meaning but the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world. Octavio Paz said that art turns the viewer into an artist. Great art is a freedom giver, offering one a sense of the breadth of one’s own possibilities, what may yet be accomplished.

For the artist their current work can be somewhat like a time machine. Each new painting opens up one’s past body of work to new interpretations and significance and claims new territory for the future. As a mature artist I find I have this large vocabulary to draw from and with this new body of work imagery found decades ago is now available and malleable. I have access to my own history with a renewed understanding of it’s original content and a deepening understanding of how these images can continue to speak for me in paint. I have also found the ability to speak to everyday experiences, tell stories and paint about current events that is liberating

I believe the making of a painting needs that moment of epiphany and a trace of how the imagery conveyed thru paint was discovered and experienced by the artist. Not a graphic notation of the language of experience but the mystery of it.