Bio and Notes
I have been painting, drawing and creating
artworks since a very young age. I recently worked to create artworks
from primitive, compound, and invented forms. I pay the bills by working
as a computer scientist. I have a rich musical background, which
I draws upon for inspiration in creating various multimedia and time-based
works. I enjoy large-scale images and commissions, such as the Via Colori street festival, where my work is displayed in large format for
the general public. I am fascinated with ways to appeal
to the general public as well as to the artist and the art critic, while
not abandoning my most intricate and personal concepts.
----- 11/03"When Michelangelo painted the Last Judgement, he did so with numerous nude figures that were in later centuries covered up by draperies. He didn't think, "gee, these would go over really well with cleverly-placed maple leafs, so I'll add them now." Instead, he painted his vision, and let the patrons worry about its acceptance.""My paintings have recently been compared to the works of Peter Maxx, but I would like to make an important distinction. While I am influenced by Peter Maxx's aparently direct painting style, my works are actually quite different. Most importantly, Peter Maxx is a very established artist with a clear direction. As an emerging artist, I am more free to choose different directions for my work. I will continue to produce a large quantity of vastly different works, until I have produced so much work that it all interrelates at some level, in much the same way that Picasso's massive collection was able to eventually relate to itself.""A lot of critics will say that an artist paints "like" another artist, as if the latter actually could have painted a work by the former. I agree that it's ok to be influenced by artists, but I have my own separate visions, and I would never agree that a painting I did could have been painted by Peter Maxx. Indeed, the opposite is equally absurd. Statements such as these only point to the critic's overexposure to artists of fradulent, purely commercial, or otherwise inferior artistic vision. Peter Maxx and I would surely both be offended by the idea that either of us could have painted works by the other... not in the technical painting ability sense, but in the sense that true artistic vision is fundamentally specific to the artist.""Forgeries are most often discovered when people notice compositional elements that are unusual to the true identity and character of the artist. Once the forgery is exposed, however, even more elements are discovered almost immediately, as the artists' true body of work can then be compared directly against the fradulent works."----- 6/03"I am leaping over a great deal of recent art in the production of my current works. I am harkening back to the days of Mondrian and Malevich, and I am using their vocabularies of shapes as a starting point to re-construct artificial worlds. I also create partially-realistic imagery by blending those shapes with rendering techniques I learned in academia. I believe the result to be a significant shift in the way that artwork is made. I hope that someday in the future, my works are recognized for this change of thinking as being the root, or an early step, in a whole new direction of fine art. I believe that the minimalists and others were successful in reaching the "zero point" of art. I am choosing to start from their "zero point", and start moving back into complex imagery, but with an invented pictorial language."
"In 1915, Malevich's gallery looked like the picture below. Has art really gone anywhere since Malevich helped to set the "zero point" for painting? Well, perhaps, but in a more commercial direction. I am choosing to look back past the abstract expressionist works, past the conceptual works of the late 20th century, to the works of the late 19th and early 20th century, for what the next century will bring. Surely, the masters working at the turn of the previous century were able to do the same thing. I am merely looking to their work for inspiration as to what the next step from "today" might be -- hence the production of my digital works. Still, I believe that the medium of painting has a universal appeal, and I apply the concepts that I work on in my digital works back into the world of painting. In allowing myself to be influenced by the super-flat colors and outlines that a computer can generate, I can take painting into the 21st century." --Devin
Малевич, Казимир
