Artist Statement

I have a deep passion for painting and a love of the many forms of expression that can be conveyed through its fluid protean materiality. Each approach that I take in my work is a way for me to explore the myriad pathways that visual art can communicate ideas and emotions. It is also a means to explore my own inner life, the subjective shadows of myself that are brought to light through the act of painting.

I am an expressive artist looking for a powerful experience in my work. Whether it is the explosive forces that erupt across my large-scale abstractions or the subjective life that the portraits convey: it is the effect that these paintings have emotionally that guides my journey. I have a deep love for the history of Western European art: it nourishes me, and gives me inspiration; it is the foundation upon which I can explore the full range of my skills, imagination and vision.

The paintings in this exhibition are both abstract and figurative. I am interested in what possibilities the fusing of these two stylistic approaches can open up. The works in this exhibit was chosen specifically to show how I am building a bridge between these two different approaches to painting. The title of this show, A Lot To Unpack, conveys how I am wrestling with a lot of different imagery; there are a lot of emotions to unpack and I am corralling them all together in order to make sense of them. The abstract works in this exhibition were created during the pandemic and were a way for me to cope with the stress and anxiety of our collective peril. 

It is a fertile field that I am exploring; seeing how the power of paint unleashed in moments of pure expression can affect and create a different experience of a portrait or a figure. These two approaches to my art engage different parts of the brain: the right hemisphere tends to function by integrating information and arriving at intuitive insights while the left hemisphere processes information in a more logical, rational and sequential way. These two halves have been compared to the male and female aspects of self; the Yin and Yang of one’s being. In bringing together these two different approaches to painting I feel as though I am not only synthesizing two forms of painting, but also working on my own inner life and weaving the feminine and masculine aspects of myself into a holistic unity.

To paint in the pure form of abstraction is improvisation; it is a kind of dance where the full body movements and the sweep of my arm as I apply my paint, articulate a record of that particular moment in time. It is also an expression of something like a kind of visual music, an improvisational composition that flows from my state of mind. I try to inhabit a Zen-like fluidity where one thing comes after another, similar to a jazz musician finding the next note to compliment what came just before. Through this process, my brush leaves a record, an expressive memory of that moment in time. 

In figurative art I find a more specifically defined form of content and meaning. To depict a person and attempt to capture not just their likeness, but also their inner life, is a very different experience. It challenges me to explore the myriad aspects of myself and guides me into a psychological space where I can empathize with my subject and express something about this individual and how they feel in the world. Each brushstroke matters in a different way. To look carefully and bring your eye and hand in sync: where what you see is conveyed by the hand to replicate the subtle and exacting curves, the volume and light of a person, and to make an image of their likeness that another can recognize, is a form of magic. The way our brain functions, the pattern recognition that allows one to encode matter, the thick viscous paint that I use to create an image of someone, is a language form that is connected to deep processes embedded within our minds. To bring abstract elements into the mix in order to affect and alter the way one interprets the image is a very exciting new path that I am exploring. 

As an artist, I feel the need to extend the language of painting into new worlds and to discover something unique that expresses my own personal vision. The marriage of abstract and figurative art opens up new possibilities for me. It fuses two forms of expression and says something about my personal quest for self-actualization. It allows me to explore the vast realms of consciousness through this most fluid and supple of mediums: the art of painting.

Eric Sanders