Artist's Statement

I am a Colorist.  The oldest surviving paintings show how important color was to early humans.  They used every conceivable pigment available to them to create incredibly durable paintings that have lasted over 35,000 years.  The Cro-Magnon paintings in the caverns of France are of deep interest to me.  I imagine my Cro-Magnon ancestors grinding earth pigments or chewing charcoal and spitting it out airbrush style around their outstretched hands to leave ghostly records of their human presence.   Modern genetic science has revealed that   we all originate from a common ancestor -- the “African Eve”.  That connectedness is important to me.  I am fascinated by human evolution, genetics and natural selection.  As a human artist I have been sculpted by eons of evolution, the climate my ancestors lived in and my life experiences.  If there is such a thing as genetic memory, I am trying to tap into it and convey it’s depth and resonance in my work.

For nearly two decades I was fixated with Monet’s art  and then I discovered that  my French-Belgian ancestors were from the same part of France as he was.  Monet’s home town of Le Havre is full of Mahieus to this day!  I do not mean to equate my talent with his, but I believe that my approach to painting is in many ways parallel due to far more primal things than my art school training.   It is this deeply primal aspect of art that I am currently exploring.

 To free one’s mind from Fundamentalism -- whether religious or artistic is an earth shattering experience.  For most of my adult life I allowed myself to be entombed in a cocoon of Fundamentalist thought and control.  At first the gossamer threads felt comforting and secure, but over the years they became a suffocating sarcophagus.  I shed Fundamentalism and it’s attendant mythologies like a hairy brown cocoon,  escaping into the prismatic light of rational thought.  My latest works reveal this process of self liberation and discovery.  My palette has exploded and my consciousness has expanded.

I have been reinvigorated by the possibilities of what a painting can be.  Each stroke of color is replete with countless possibilities.  When the piece of paint is liberated from having to represent a bit of soil, a tree or a flower petal the universe of possibilities is opened.  Imagery is often the excuse for a painting --  it is the departure point.  My paintings are not about the departure point they are about the creative process that follows. They are like time-lapse photographs of that process.   I want my art to be transparent, approachable and tactile.  I want it to reach out and elicit a visceral experience in the viewer.

These paintings wrestled with me and I with them.  Under some of these paintings there are many other beautiful ones,  and ugly ones --  paintings that fought me and paintings that I slew, obliterated and ultimately mastered.  My life and my art has been a search for truth and beauty. These paintings are about wrestling with the ugliness, pain and cruelty of life to create meaning, love and joy in the midst of desolation.  They did not come easily.  I have called painting “Techni-Color evisceration” and that is an apt description.  At the very least I feel that I have bled paint.  If I have captured beauty I have triumphed, if I have captured pain I have been honest.  After all, I have found life to be a balance of both.

--Brian Mahieu, July 2006
www.brianmahieu.com