2022 - 2023
DP Statement 2023
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making things that made sense to me and completed me as a person. The search for meaning and beauty (“Venus Principle”) by drawing, painting, sculpting, and photographing all seemed the only natural way for me to explain the world and create that beauty in it. Fortunately I was taught and mentored by some of the finest - Gui Ignon in Ojai, then Elmer Bischoff, Peter Voulkos, Richard Diebenkorn, Karl Kasten at UC Berkeley — and many others along the way. My careers as an artist, architect and builder have been a natural extension of appreciating the puzzles of beauty and truth. I understand how fortunate I am to receive the same vibrant feeling of creation I felt when I was eight, digging in the dirt, making miniature houses (with scraps of anything), then cities, then my imaginary worlds in abstract and surreal paintings, and now photographs of transient constructions.
Currently, aside from figurative portraiture, I make temporary sculptures with anything you or I can think of. More often than not I manipulate trash and recycled materials in baths of pigmented liquids. I introduce motion and lights (filtered, reflected, refracted), causing these three-dimensional concoctions to constantly change as I work for a meaningful, symbolic story. As they transform, dissolve, disintegrate … cease to be what they were, I photograph the images at the moment they reveal my intended “stories” for specific audiences, including, of course, the artist’s sine quo nihil (without which nothing).
Time seems to be the only constant ingredient of the transience, yet over time it too varies: for each individual, time’s rhythmic amplitudes increase - younger amplitudes are flat and wandering, and give way to an elder’s spikes of desires for more of these moments between the past and the future (tao). Capturing those spikes in a momentary image does nothing to lengthen the wavelengths back to a younger self, but rather grants reprieves with sometimes joyous revelations of self. Fortunately, these temporary sculptures share and implore the divination universe of Astrology and the I Ching.
www.donporter.com @donporterart
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making things that made sense to me and completed me as a person. The search for meaning and beauty (“Venus Principle”) by drawing, painting, sculpting, and photographing all seemed the only natural way for me to explain the world and create that beauty in it. Fortunately I was taught and mentored by some of the finest - Gui Ignon in Ojai, then Elmer Bischoff, Peter Voulkos, Richard Diebenkorn, Karl Kasten at UC Berkeley — and many others along the way. My careers as an artist, architect and builder have been a natural extension of appreciating the puzzles of beauty and truth. I understand how fortunate I am to receive the same vibrant feeling of creation I felt when I was eight, digging in the dirt, making miniature houses (with scraps of anything), then cities, then my imaginary worlds in abstract and surreal paintings, and now photographs of transient constructions.
Currently, aside from figurative portraiture, I make temporary sculptures with anything you or I can think of. More often than not I manipulate trash and recycled materials in baths of pigmented liquids. I introduce motion and lights (filtered, reflected, refracted), causing these three-dimensional concoctions to constantly change as I work for a meaningful, symbolic story. As they transform, dissolve, disintegrate … cease to be what they were, I photograph the images at the moment they reveal my intended “stories” for specific audiences, including, of course, the artist’s sine quo nihil (without which nothing).
Time seems to be the only constant ingredient of the transience, yet over time it too varies: for each individual, time’s rhythmic amplitudes increase - younger amplitudes are flat and wandering, and give way to an elder’s spikes of desires for more of these moments between the past and the future (tao). Capturing those spikes in a momentary image does nothing to lengthen the wavelengths back to a younger self, but rather grants reprieves with sometimes joyous revelations of self. Fortunately, these temporary sculptures share and implore the divination universe of Astrology and the I Ching.
www.donporter.com @donporterart
