Artist’s Statement

Flow Foods

My paintings set up a visual representation of the cycle connecting food and the land. Like the ancient images of cornucopia my images of food items flow out of the land and into the observers eyes, hands, and plates. Vibrant flowing landscapes above create the fertile land that releases it’s bounty like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine. I use palette knives to keep the paint flowing, thick, and textural to add to these cascading fountains of richness. The joy of real food meets the joy of painting in my artwork. A feast for the eyes!

The three necessities of life; air, water, and food are all tied together with the earth as provider. We often go about our lives not thinking much about the connection of ourselves to these components except when some cataclysmic event such as global warming comes to light. I have always sensed this linkage as I grew up in the Midwest of the U.S.A. mostly around and on farms. I often spent summers working in fields and noticing all of the elements coming together to create the wonderful variety of foods that I put into my body and sent on for others to consume. I noticed how the land would naturally give life to various edible plants and how animals would utilize these and would in turn be eaten by us. This was a simple sustainable system that I hope we are waking up to once again. Awareness of the way our food comes to us and what we choose to ingest is one of the most important political acts we can do both personally and collectively.

Artist’s Statement

The Flowing World

(A Gorgeous Mess)

The 20th century artist Mark Rothko defined art’s purpose to ”distill all experiences down to their essential unity”.

Moments in my life when I have had this experience of “wholeness” are what I continue to pay attention to and I find it in the world especially in the sunlight scenes of the landscape as they cascade down around me. I sense more than meets the eye and so I expand these windows of the visible to include the unseen forces of nature. Exposure to natural phenomenon and the beauty of the landscape provide me with ample inspiration for my paintings.

I internalize the world around me as I see it dissolve into light, color, and movement. I am of the first generation of people to grow up watching TV.  Even then I looked for Nature shows that inspired me to travel and look deeply, especially to the quality of light in the scenes. The vibrations of the TV screen echoed the vibrations in Nature that I sensed, This is now brought out in scientific discoveries about everything being made up of energy. It seem this vibrational cinema graphic viewpoint has crept into these works as widescreen fields of the moving energy of life. These lighted fields of visual experiences are what I wander in for the experience of unity.

 Clay Vajgrt

(Pronounced Vay -Gert)