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My work is about beauty, enchantment, and mystery, and is guided by the belief that art should transcend the mundane. I use surrealist-inspired methods to create evocative populated landscapes that explore relationships by fusing iconic imagery—imagery that recalls Chagall in its playfulness and medieval manuscript illumination in its use of pictorial space—with the visual density and moodiness of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights or Giger's dystopian paintings. These landscapes, though taking cues from macabre styles of art, are serene, echoing the intention of classical Chinese painters to invite the viewer to look into rather than at the work of art and thereby be transported to an awareness that is best described using the Japanese aesthetic concept of yuugen, or profound grace. My imagery—which often serves as a foil upon which to engage formal issues such as composition, texture, and colour—comes from all aspects of my lived experience and includes stylized representations of figures in landscapes, accompanied by elemental forms, humanoid and anthropomorphic beings and plants, buildings and ruins, and enigmatic phenomena. In addition to finding inspiration from historical artists, I integrate aspects of popular culture—among them film, music, and cartoons—into the work.
A more extensive artist statement can be found at http://edpas.net/portfolio/artist-statement/.
Last Updated 24 January 2007
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