____________________________________________Artist Statement 2008
Mike Schonebaum
Academically and art historically, my work is concerned with
the forms and conventions of abstraction and process. I’m influenced by all the
great art that came out of the 50s and 60s, as wells as contemporary painters
such as Lela Ali, Terry Winters, and Tom Noskowski. I also look at a lot
of (for lack of a better term) outsider art.
I am intrigued by line, color, and
pattern. Creating works that are interesting and beautiful. I create work that reflects
honesty and my relationship to material through playful ambiguity. Imagine a personal vocabulary of mark
making, found shape, and the exploration of color chemistry colliding to create
a gorgeous train wreck, predetermined and orchestrated by the hand of a mad
scientist.
A paradoxical game of tug-of-war is
played between the conscious and unconscious where neither truly wants to
win. For without one, there can be
no other. The result is a play
between imagination and choice.
The imagination is a gatekeeper, the medium through which the two parts
of the mind communicate. I attempt to bring the theory of active imagination into a contemporary context in my latest works. The goal of active
imagination is to assimilate the contents
(fantasies, experiences, dreams, emotions, ect.) of the conscious and
unconscious mind through some form of self-expression. This act gives a voice to both sides of
the personality, creating a line of communication between the conscious and
unconscious mind. I am
incorporating drawing and different ways of mark making into my latest
paintings trying to find new ways to explore my ideas.
I think Dubuffet says it best, “We
participate in an artistic process which is completely pure, raw, and entirely
reinvented in all of its phases by the artist, from his impulses alone. Therefore, of an art which manifests
itself through the function of invention only.”
