PETER VANFLEET

EXHIBITIONS AND SHOWS

ARTIST STATEMENT

Individual paintings are like flowers and weeds pushing up and growing only once. But as in Kenneth Rexroth's poem, Hapax (on the Century Tree Cactus Plant), a great painting flowers once in a hundred years. An artist can spend his whole life just to produce one great painting.

I would like to think my paintings form at a precognitive juncture of the senses. As an abstract artist I think it important to understand this stance.

According to the neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, 80% of all feedback from our senses comes from sight, so the major conveyance tool artists obviously use is sight. However, it is the other 20% of what we ingest from the outside that truly makes a painting, the profoundest being music:

Harmony and cacophony building to a crescendo,

Both part of the same whole

Obviously or subtly

Manifest in the painting.

The tactical and taste senses

Texture and relief

To feel and touch with your eyes

The rawness and flavor in the composition

Yes, Yes, Yes

I hope to convey the unity of inner-outer, material-spiritual, accidental-preordained so to feel life as a hosanna to joy. In the moment of creating this does occur.

To take charge of my fate while being asleep at the wheel.

Peter Van Fleet