Dave Waddell
Houston, TX
Artist's Statement:
I was once asked, “What would you say if someone asked you what you painted?” and insufficiently, I said to this person “I paint meat.” But is it abstract? Thinking contemporary, my friend said that she had a feeling of what it would this work look like for such an inadequate and non-descriptive answer. To elaborate, if forced, I would say:
"I was really intrigued by the work of Jenny Saville’s self-portraits. I admire the way that she can capture the fleshiness and the weight of the human figure through paint. I also liked the viewer/painting relationship. I use meat in the sense that we can relate to the sensory aspects of the texture and vulnerability that skin, blood and muscle have. I started out using meat as a figurative aspect in my work. I created these still lives that could easily be manipulated.
"The format of my paintings vary from piece to piece depending on my influences at the time. I study art history by making paintings based on other artists. The unexpected color situations with pastel based Pontormo’s transfer over into meat portraiture. Caravaggio’s subjects that crawl out of pockets of darkness are reflected in meat landscapes where kidneys, hooves and pork chops jump out of drawers or submerge from shadows on a table. Guston’s aggressive attitude for simplifying images into a series playful and childlike shapes is fundamental for my own painting cycle."
