Joseph Barron
An Unfortunate Series of Distractions
2018

Name: An Unfortunate Series of Distractions
Brand: Joseph Barron
Price: 11125 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Joseph Barron graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA and MFA. Shortly after graduating, Barron was awarded a Pollock-Krasner foundation Grant that allowed him to create a series of works which helped him demonstrate the artistic strength that would help him to soon win another award, a New York City studio space grant from the Marie Walsh Sharp Foundation. Joe now lives in Sarasota County in Florida where he paints canvases and large-scale murals for public and private spaces. Joe is now focusing mainly on canvas works, drawing thematic material from current events and reconciling them with timeless archetypes and mythologies STATEMENT: The first goal: to perform the ritual of mixing and preparing the paint. The second: to make something intelligible in the language of paint, in a perceptual representational style drawing from history, to speak to a timeless ethos. My traditional technique lets me flex socially acceptable muscles in a sleight of hand that allows the deviant to slip in, and it also offers a personal disciplined challenge that gives me both pain and pleasure. I enjoy the deceitful convention of painting a visually recognizable form onto a two dimensional surface. My representational technique could be read as retrograde but that would be only a partial superficial and therefore inaccurate reading. I believe in my work, the technical style is also defiantly and simultaneously cutting edge, in its audacious triaxial intent of entertaining, informing and perplexing the audience in service of contemporary socio-geo-political criticism. Life is chaotic and wacky. But, it has a purpose. I don’t know what that purpose is, but it appears to me, (and of course I am not proclaiming anything that hasn’t been already proposed by wiser individuals than me), to be about energy- a harmony of energies or maybe a single energy that runs throughout everything or maybe that energy just simply is everything. The reason for our existence may not necessarily be a reason that we even can know. It might be a simple purpose and it might be complex, but one thing I’m sure of is that we are complex. Our sociology is complex. Our politics are complex. Our histories are complex. In my current work I’m starting my departure from a place in art history, albeit mainly that of western history. As a white male from the suburban Midwest I must start where I was planted, shedding ballast as I portage between points on the map. I’m exploring the past both visually and socio-politically and reconciling that past with current characters’ foibles and folly. I believe, that maybe more than ever, art is needed today, to preclude conflict and attempt healing. In today’s factional and toxic climate there is need for art which hands itself over in an enlightening, sympathetic way. My hope and belief is that a deflective display of comedy will be ultimately more persuasive than inflammatory demagoguery. I hope I am not so unique in this conviction but perhaps I would like to think of myself as singular in depiction, my particular assortment and juxtaposition of characters, which I draw into my art. My aim is to share a vision of optimism while also reflecting contemporary circumstances, whether they are triumphant or troubling. I always want to do this with humor, (well at least for now), and I truly always want to do this with critical self-scrutiny and I always want to do this with everything that I have in me. Having said all the above, with all of its self-conscious, pretentious, art-critical and philosophical clichés, plainly and simply, I just love to paint landscapes, plants, people and life. And, I hope, through art’s filter, some good comes of it

Creator:

Joseph Barron (1959, American)

Creation Year:

2018

Dimensions:

Height: 48 in (121.92 cm)Width: 36 in (91.44 cm)

Medium:

Acrylic

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

21st Century