New artist statement.

I like my work to straddle the line where material transforms into image.  It is my hope that, in doing so, some of the emotional and intellectual attachment that the viewer feels towards the depicted imagery is also transferred to the raw material.
I began exploring this idea through the use of large blank spaces with small clusters of imagery.  These empty areas portrayed deep, light-filled vistas while remaining obviously flat (the flatness sometimes emphasized with pasted attachments).  This work was (and much of my work still is) very influenced by the grandeur of the wilderness sky as depicted by the American Transcendentalist painters and by the contrasting simplicity and modesty of Japanese Ukiyo-E prints (Hokusai and Hiroshige specifically)
More recently, I have pursued these ideas in mixed-media paintings and drawings that use labor (in a similar way to how I use raw material) as their central theme.  These pieces have some sections that are left raw and others that are fully rendered.  They retain the evidence of the time and labor of their construction but, because they reach a final, arrested state, the raw areas (and, as such, the mundane work that they exhibit) attain a sense of completeness. Frank Auerbach caught something of this idea in his statement that “one can only tell the brute truth in the middle of a quarrel.”  Though I don’t really count Auerbach as an influence, I do see a definite similarity in the way that he displays process and material in his paintings.
I have also been using bulls and bovine-like animals in my recent work.  I am drawn to them because of their ordinariness (at least from the perspective of a Midwesterner), because they are used as labor, and, contrastingly, because they are a traditional symbol of power, heroism, and male sexuality in art.  They become metaphors that mythologize the commonplace yet critique the hero myth.
In my work I seek to expose the poetry and drama of simple physicality.

-Nicholas Dowgwillo