Artist Statement:  Nathan Huff

 

“ I forgot that every aspect of the common day makes or unmakes character.”

Oscar Wilde

I am fascinated by the passage of time; intrigued by the ways that our daily actions and often mundane decisions influence our futures.  Public vs. Private and Intimate vs. Corporate are the contexts that I find my artwork seeking to engage.  Through my painting practice I ask the question, “How are individual’s lives constructed as they navigate these polar experiences?”

The images I create depict individuals as they navigate public spaces. Often crossing through a threshold or limimal space, I seek to bring acknowledgment to the complex nature of our daily activities.  I am intrigued by multiplicity, realizing that there are numerous options and possible paths that one travels on.   The figures in my paintings move through contemporary constructed reality, yet there are ruptures that take place in the paint application.

Drawing on traditions of narration and abstract painting, I desire to engage contemporary painting dialogues by referencing these methodologies.  Elements of figuration and abstraction oscillate through the painted forms on my canvases.  Exploration of space, motion, and time enhance these dialogues of multiplicity.  Viewers are invited into the painted scenes through various passageways.  Some are blocked, others dissolve, but the coalescing of a fractured experience is my goal.  It is not often why or how a decision is being made but the fact that brick by brick, walls are constructed in the architecture of our lives.