ARTIST STATEMENT

"Life and art serve each other. Ideally, living leads to art and art back to a fuller appreciation of life. I think this is true for the artist as creator and the audience as artist as well.

It is the function of art to reveal, to inspire, to put us in touch with our deepest feelings and concerns, our purest and most real self and enable us to reflect upon that which is most meaningful in life. Also, art offers pleasure and insight into others as well as ourselves and challenges habits of perceiving and conceptualizing. The artist functions as a spiritual healer reaffirming our belief in life, awakening the soul to new awareness, offering a means for us to redefine and recreate ourselves.

A dictionary definition of abstraction indicates to draw away, to remove, separate, bring forth, select. In my work I endeavor to bring forth, to reveal and through selection to separate and get to the essential. Beauty in art is achieved when the work coheres, is expressive and is imbued with spirit and life. Initially what led me to art was a pleasure in the process of drawing. The visual held a particular fascination for me. At first, it was simply a form of play. As I grew older it grew in meaning and significance, but it was always being fed by the circumstances of my life.

The process of creating is infinitely complex. With me, a certain urgency is involved, a compulsion, a forgetting, a remembering, leading to a natural, ineluctable expression where I am constantly violating my intentions, constantly reshaping, forming, delineating, configuring, obscuring, clarifying, discovering and through this process, if fortunate, finally achieving a harmonious structure, a context in which things happen in a relationship one to another, each element contributing to the whole.

The challenge of creativity is there for everyone whatever their profession or walk of life. That is, to put things together in a new and more meaningful way."

Ronald DeNitto