Issue #1 Winter 2002
Urban Street Games
by Brian Curtis
|
|
 |
 |
Urban Street Games #1Magister Ludi |
Urban Street Games #2The Fall |
Urban Street Games #3Street Shoot |
 |
 |
|
Urban Street Games #5Let the Games Begin |
Urban Street Games #7Northern Frieze |
(click on images to enlarge)
Artist's Statement
For nearly twenty years my work has been evolving toward what I like to describe as an ambiguous symbolic narrative style. It can also been called implicit allegory because its veiled, plural meanings
contrast with the specificity of traditional allegory. My paintings attempt to suggest more than they describe and as such are continuing in the approach started by the Symbolists in the late 19th century. While I employ the classical motifs of highly organized, frontally-layered space, well-proportioned anatomy, clearly defined of form, my paintings parallel contemporary narrative themes through their lack of heroic, didactic or historic content. I explore the difficult, indistinct, transitional, tentative experience of figures caught between times of activity. This focus on narrative content springs from a need to cherish the fragility of human experience. In an age of holocaust, widespread intellectual cynicism, terrorism, and a catastrophic world health crisis I hope to encourage common myths and shared experience by monumentalizing the ordinary.
As I develop as an artist I continually discover that representation gives the painter access to as rich a storehouse of ideas, forms, and colors as any the human imagination can provide and that traditional ideas about value, truth, and beauty cannot be as easily dismissed as current taste and trends might indicate. The enduring pictorial elements that have given form to representational art of the past prove to be surprisingly effective as a counterpoint to contemporary emotional turmoil. They offer a stable vantage point from which to view the riddles of our time. Understood in this way, my work, at its best, might be said to a reweaving of the ordered beauty and narrative clarity of Giotto with the contemporary search for self-meaning as represented in the cinematic works of Woody Allen & Ingmar Bergman.
My work aims for a credible synthesis of modern uncertainties with the classical narrative tradition and the result is an art that can't help but be self-conscious of its past. My respect and appreciation for this past and the desire to engage in an art that is widely accessible and democratic aligns my work with the overlapping and crisscrossing sensibilities that, ironically, have been described as the essence of Classical Post-Modernism.
©2002 Brian Curtis
Brian Curtis has exhibited his paintings in juried, invitational, and solo exhibitions throughout North America. He is the author of Drawing from Observation, an introductory perceptual drawing textbook published by McGraw-Hill's College Division. Curtis is also an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.