Drawings and Paintings, by John Guillory

Artist’s Statement appears below the image block.

Artist’s Statement

In college, I discovered a book of paintings by Lucian Freud. The paintings expressed a modern sense of realism that held my attention more than the abstract and conceptual artists whose work left me scratching my head and agitated. Freud’s skillful handling of paint revealed something about what being alive feels like in our time. They revealed to me what was possible.

I dedicated myself to learn how to draw and paint by following the excitement I felt inspired by modern painters of the figure like Freud, Euan Uglow, Francis Bacon, and others. To me, a drawing feels like an old hand-written letter that conveys a lost intimate understanding of an event, a person, a scene. In both drawings and paintings, the marks must stand as both marks and as the object it represents. This illusory play between subject and media gives the work its dynamic quality.

In the last several years, I have ventured into non-representational paintings and print-making. I rely exclusively on design elements to convey something—an idea, impression, emotion, impulse—that I cannot or am unable to know completely prior to initiating a painting, even while inspired by old walls, layers of torn broadsides and posters on the side of buildings, street art and graffiti–all signs of our compulsion to communicate and connect.

In addition, photography insists that I never forget it’s the medium of our historical moment. New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (2005) watered the seed of my interest in both documentary photography and street photography inspired by the early colorists, notably Saul Leiter and William Eggleston.

—John Guillory