From the Artist
In the late nineties I experienced an awakening, forcing me to renew my relationship with life. My father had a horrific medical crisis and is now disabled from the event. Since then I have a new visualization of my world; a world filled with silent stillness. I began to examine the world up close. So close I could feel death in everything. Being broken inside, I became very sensitive to the "now", and from this I discovered the rhythms of life. This helped me tear away from the pain into a vigorous feeling of life. In my work I unify the rhythms and use them to connect myself with the environment.
Rhythms pulse with life. They are made up of energy and are found inside everything. I have been longing for freshness, even shock. Out of the "now", I had discovered the activity in time that tears the "now" away. It is not a set moment, but is dynamic and near rhythmic. There is tremendous searching and growth, to find the world that exists. I found love, and I explore the terrain of love in its many aspects and guises that have gone unnoticed and are dulled by the familiarities of everyday life.
I document and gather information from ordinary life experiences. I am guided in my work by a point of focus that is representational of my heightened sensory perception. Abstract script and marks of paint, around the point of focus, tear away and create searching and growth. Every mark is like a container of energy and creates complex behavior in simple things that allow the greatest movement of energy and information. Each gesture of paint is a reduced image to translate nature's infinite variety. My fractal brushstrokes create an association between force and form: motion and universal events happening in space. These individual fractals unite as it moves me around the canvas never following the exact path.
I have united 20th and 21st century theories of art, science, and religion, creating a universal concept of the forces of harmony in the universe. Certain regions of the paintings have compressed areas creating solidity of form and space. While in other areas there is long lasting space. Juxtaposed, flat, intense colors push forward on the pictural plane, as they do in life. Rawness and intensity of colors create energy, purity and jolts me into my large scale paintings that become a stage. Force of gravity moves me into, through, and around my work to create an activity in time, as I search for higher dimensions of the spiritual that is a part of our ordinary life as we move in the environment.
- Nathan DiStefano
Learn more about Nathan DiStefano's background and education.
