Artist Statement

[Eric Hunter]

I try to approach my work as an exercise of visual problem solving that leads me towards a deeper understanding of life’s unknown elements.  Painting and drawing are the best tools that I have for unfolding my life and deepening my perceptions of it. I need to be able to make work that is honest, and true to myself.  The implications of my work are unconscious at first, continually unfolding into my awareness of self and the world around me.

 

For me painting has been an instinctual, physical, and spatial experience.  I like the challenge of working on a larger scale.  It has forced me to develop less conventional methods of applying paint to achieve an exciting, provocative image. I have incorporated a bar blender while experimenting with a variety of vehicles and mediums, in order change the quality of the painted surface quickly and thoroughly.

 

My work comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. I work on canvases that I would consider a typical easel size painting. I also frequently work large canvases, and occasionally tackle a surface monumental in size, when the desire a sense of being surrounded by the work becomes paramount. My larger paintings have become more than just two-dimensional surfaces; they assert their physical presence, and at the same time create large spaces into which I can project myself.

 

I also have experimented more recently the challenge of creating this same monumental sensibility to a small-scale canvas. To achieve this I apply the same rigorous techniques to build up a physical, multi-textural surface yet keeping the design somewhat simpler. I find the results to be as profound as my larger work, and as engaging to the viewer as it has a more personal and intimate appeal I purposefully avoid trying to force a theme or a narrative in my work. I am exited about how the image evolves through many layers of paint, over an extended period of time, using the additive and subtractive methods of contemporary painting. It is in this way that my work has sought the ambiguous, the indeterminate, and the unknowable.