These paintings are a reflection on what it's like to live in a world where everything comes at a price.
Artist Statement
We live in a culture where everything comes at a price – our health, our good times, how we feel about others and express those feelings, how safe we feel, how successful we feel, and even how we feel about ourselves. All of our problems are supposed to be resolved by the products that we can buy. But this is simply impossible. Consumer goods cannot take the place of social capital – perhaps the most important factor in determining the happiness and well being of a community of people. The social capital of America today is abysmally low. It is becoming increasingly vital that we ask ourselves how it got this way, and work to get past a culture of competition, individualism, and wariness of those who are different from us.
It’s easy to look at others and focus on their perceived faults; how we ourselves are better and more deserving of the good things in life that we think we have earned. It takes true courage and compassion to try to understand lives and circumstances outside of our own.
In order to slowly diminish our social capital, and encourage us to instead attempt to buy solutions to our sadness and disconnectedness, consumer goods and what they represent need to look unrealistically beautiful. But what we always end up finding is that the reality of our world is much more serious and complex – the beauty is for display only.
We live in a culture where everything comes at a price – our health, our good times, how we feel about others and express those feelings, how safe we feel, how successful we feel, and even how we feel about ourselves. All of our problems are supposed to be resolved by the products that we can buy. But this is simply impossible. Consumer goods cannot take the place of social capital – perhaps the most important factor in determining the happiness and well being of a community of people. The social capital of America today is abysmally low. It is becoming increasingly vital that we ask ourselves how it got this way, and work to get past a culture of competition, individualism, and wariness of those who are different from us.
It’s easy to look at others and focus on their perceived faults; how we ourselves are better and more deserving of the good things in life that we think we have earned. It takes true courage and compassion to try to understand lives and circumstances outside of our own.
In order to slowly diminish our social capital, and encourage us to instead attempt to buy solutions to our sadness and disconnectedness, consumer goods and what they represent need to look unrealistically beautiful. But what we always end up finding is that the reality of our world is much more serious and complex – the beauty is for display only.