Jonathan Franklin ART

                          Revealing and Concealing

  

     My earliest attempts at making art were copied from the pages of Mad Magazine.   Having never officially studied art until I majored in it in college. I learned the basics, but one thing that made the biggest impression on me was being introduced to art history. 

    There are just too many artists to mention who made indelible impressions on me.  But there were a few, like Picasso and Cubism.  Egon Schiele, who died tragically young, whose elongated figures were steeped with emotion. Max Beckmann painted scenes that were both dramatic and theatrical, and Saul Steinberg's inventive merging of line and humor took my breath away. 

     As I absorbed the work all of these artists, I was also in search of my own artistic voice.  I found that I was most attracted to the human figure and the portrait because, as subjects, they were familiar, intimate, and immediate.  But unlike relying on the natural world as a source of inspiration, I from inside-out as opposed to outside-in, relying more on my imagination and intuition.

      Often, whether on paper or canvas, I attempt to make  incongruous and disjointed pieces fit together. The  painting or work on paper that emerges  often appears to be distorted and exaggerated, dissonant.  

     None of this occurs in a linear trajectory.  It is a circuitous journey of trial-and-error.  Just as writers edit and reedit what they have written, I, too, can spend  weeks and even months working on a painting or a work on paper.  And then years and even decades later, return to it to rework it some more.   

     Ultimately, for me, making art is about problem solving  and creating a small bit order within a chaotic world.  It is an act of transformation; about concealing unspoken ideas from below the surface and revealing them above.