Artist Statement

When I begin a painting I am rarely sure how it will resolve. It is in itself a part of a greater whole. That is; it has something in it of the work before it. In this I believe painting is like language and paintings like words, each making-up a kind of vocabulary whose meaning becomes clearer or at least more complete with each subsequent work.

My images are not of real places but of the imagined, felt or memorized-places of the mind.

I like to think of them as magical and dream like aspects of the deeper mind and subconscious. However my work is not limited to making interesting or even thought provoking pictures, though I certainly hope they are. I am after all a painter; which means that paint itself is my medium of choice as opposed to other crafts. I find power and excitement in the medium and application, in the fluid to solid quality of the material. In glazing, scumbling, scratching, scraping and wiping away, in the laying down of veils of color and in the pure physical interplay between the canvas and myself.

Painting for me is like magic, what you see is not what you see. The closer you get to the surface the more the picture fades away and the more its just about paint. With all of it's beautiful blemishes, brush marks and hair's, bubbles, cracks, and studio detritus. Step a few feet back and you re-enter the place of dreams.

Paint is mere paint until the hand and mind of the painter sets it free and uses it to create something of visual-magic that has the power to stir emotion, memory and feeling. How a simple plastic material can have this much power over the human psyche has always been a mystery and fascination to me (as it most likely must have been to the early cave painters some twenty thousand years ago) and is probably the single greatest reason why I chose to be a painter or even perhaps that painting chose me.

Barry Masteller