Art

Artist’s State­ment

I believe in icons.

In today’s media-fueled world we are bom­barded by imagery of all sorts. Many of these images tend to be “iconic” and burn their way into our col­lec­tive con­scious­ness. These images often develop a mean­ing that is entirely their own and depart vastly from the ini­tial con­text. What type of images “burn” into ones mind, con­sciously or not, is of great inter­est to me.

It strikes me that a strong iconic image – of any sort – dif­fers from todays con­cep­tual mantra and the “art for art’s sake” norm. Icons are, by nature, com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools. As such they tend to push their mes­sage in a very straight for­ward man­ner that can be under­stood on many levels.

I like to bor­row or cre­ate my own icons from clas­si­cal influ­ences but add a healthy dose of our cur­rent pop­u­lar cul­ture and often inter­twine oppos­ing ideas. My Icons dis­re­gard their orig­i­nal con­text and instead replace or update the ini­tial mean­ings. I may por­tray a Madonna as a top­less Magde­lena, who forces a cross toward the viewer –at knife­point– as if she was an inquisi­tor. I may also choose to por­tray a clas­sic Ortho­dox Madonna hold­ing a lowly tin­foil wrapped burrito.

Through­out his­tory icons have rep­re­sented reli­gious, or polit­i­cal ideals, this takes form not only in the illus­trated image, but in the com­po­si­tion of the art­work at a very root level. Often sacred geom­e­try is used to cre­ate dynamic images that have a deeper hid­den mean­ing. Tri­an­gles, arcs, pyra­mids, the Golden Mean are all preva­lent in tra­di­tional icons in spe­cific pro­por­tions, and all are used to enhance an icons inner message.

The Freema­sons love sym­bols, geom­e­try, and secret hid­den mean­ings, which is one of the rea­sons I have been so intrigued by their col­lec­tive art­work. While research­ing Masonic art­work, I found that many of the great­est artists in his­tory were Freema­sons and used sacred Masonic geom­e­try in their work.

I decided that if I was to make proper icons, I should try to learn how to include some of these ideals in my own work. The major­ity of my icons have a solid geo­met­ric foun­da­tion which I then try to obfus­cate with brash col­ors and banal cul­tural imagery. My work may have an overt polit­i­cal mes­sage, or sim­ply be a humor­ous imbal­ance of imagery & symbolism.

Tech­ni­cally, as a painter, I try to mix up tra­di­tional paint­ing tech­niques with mod­ern paint chem­istry. I use a lot of tra­di­tional gold leaf in my work, but also work with hand-made holo­graphic paints and cus­tom pig­ments. I may com­bine a tra­di­tional glaz­ing tech­nique for color yet over­lay a hard­line black line-work in an auto­mo­tive pin­strip­ing technique.

- Chris Shaw, 2010

Draw­ings

Paint­ings