Monday, October 20, 2014

More sleepy time paintings

A couple of more paintings about sleep.
How Can I Forget You, 30" by 40", oil on canvas, 2014

Medicine For Regret, 32" by 40", oil on canvas, 2014

Artist statement 2014

Weirdly distorted and morphing figures in confusing spaces. Patterned marks, raw colours and contrasts, shifting perspective, layers and history of making. Paintings that represent people and spaces but also reference the flatness of surface.
The subject of human interaction is fascinating. For an introverted person, meeting other people is often fraught with anxiety. The anxiety is processed into these paintings.
Scenes from everyday life act as an armature onto which energetic brushwork infuse these scenes with activity and evoke a sense of fleeting memories.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Artist statement: in progress

Artist Statement Pete Kohut: ugh. it feels like i don't have much that's holding together for a series :(
WHAT AM I DOING?
I'm making images that represent our daily life while evoking the fragmented nature in which we preceive and understand the world around us. 1.The coffee shop in North America is very much like the cafe in European countries, except that it can also function as a place to work, read, study, and be "alone".  It's a peculiar space especially for that last reason. I'm interested in the crossover of behaviours between the two types of spaces, private and public. 2. Media culture has affects how we think and feel about the world. 3. I'm using retrograde media to show the limits of current media.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
I'm driven to create images that seduce the viewer to inspect it closer, spend more time with it, and be rewarded by being able to read deeper into an image. 1. I find that digital media does not have the ability to hold our attention for long, mostly because we are so saturated by images so I wanted to create images that do hold our attention for longer than the brief glance that we normally attribute to images. 2. I believe that it is important as human beings to digest our images so that we may sort out what we think and feel. I want to create a situation where a viewer is rewarded from spending time in front of an image with a protected chunk of time in which they can contemplate, to create an alternative space for the viewer's mind to exercise it's thinking. 3. I want the viewer to be reminded to spend their lives in the present. All we have is now. You exist now. I feel the the media saturated culture we live in promotes us to be on the move, ever quickening the pace until we are exhausted, leaving us empty and hungry for more from life than glossy advertisements and consumer goods.
Scenes from the coffee shop, daydreaming, couples ignoring each other, people enacting their private lives in a public space.

? Do I need to go back and make a few more of these?

yep