Artists who have influenced me since childhood

Fernand Leger

The biggest influences on me since childhood have been visual artists who have broke the barrier of how we perceive reality and explored the unknown through their visual dissections and analysis. Artists who struggled to find new ground through the breakdown of reality whether it be abstract, surreal, or even a fantasized interpretation of life. For me personally, doing portraits or landscapes never had quite the appeal to my mind as did abstraction or surrealism. I found that my mind naturally gravitated towards the unusual and the intimate composition invited me to explore life in an enclosed space where the experimentation with color, form, shape, and space all fused into one allowed me the challenges and rewards of being more of a probing scientific artist.

When I speak of these influences, I am talking about inspirational mavericks who took an object or scene and saw something completely different that could be explored. They extracted new visions from life and reality. Although you may disagree with my premise (I do find portrait and landscape artists amazing creatives in their own right), abstraction and surrealism to me is an artist who probes deep into the unknown and tries to extract the nectar from the fruit (underlying foundations of life from reality). For me, artists such as Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch, Wassily Kandinsky, M.C. Escher, and Jackson Pollock all inspired me to challenge convention and break free of what I live in and around everyday. They also influenced the way I perceive composition through balancing elements in harmonic ways through the use of color, line, shape, and contrasting values. I thank these pioneers for their courage and conviction to explore mysterious ground and come out with a new understanding of life.