Artists Statement

[Bryan Prillwitz]

    My drawings and paintings combine war machines with the human image to portray primitive feelings and sexuality, inner memory, desire and conflict. I want to describe the tortures of denial and the feeling of diminishment that exists for both sexes in this period of perpetual war. The pairing of the elegant with the brooding, and the feminine with the masculine are made real through the physicality of paint and the performance of line.

    I control the raw opacity and translucency of my layers of paint, physically layering one top of the other to describe and recount memories of the most primitive feelings, desires and emotions.

    The heavy paint is often layered between softer and translucent layers of line that are more delicate. My more feminine, elegant line reflects beauty that is mysterious and elusive. That which is beautiful in nature is that which is most mysterious, like that dark jungle river ride into the orange sun, mystery, destiny, and happy ending.

    I think that the flesh and blood in my paintings is of Dionysus, of desire, as well as of a tortured feeling of diminishment, or denial. Gender, race, and class conflict come together almost as one memory, that is of the flesh, or as a clash of the flesh.

    I intend for my paintings to impart to the viewer a sublime sense of awe, that is, an impression of the power of beauty and of the flesh, and a sensitivity for that which within us is most vulnerable, which makes us visceral, autonomous and individual.

 Bryan Prillwitz 11/7/2012