Statement

Although my work is often categorized as abstract, I see it as inhabiting a space between objective and nonobjective painting. The combination of these two worlds, serve as a matrix for what are essentially autobiographical works. I am interested in the symbolic potential of the objective world and the possibilities abstraction presents in suggesting the unknown. My influences range from second-generation abstract expressionism to forms found in nature to structural drawings by Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller.

In some way, the intellect can analyze the work, but ultimately, when the paintings are working, it is hard to explain the how and the why. It is easy to make a formal analysis of the work and to position it in the great and diverse continuum of contemporary painting. Yet, it is my belief that the painting must do its work from a more subversive place, a place familiar yet enigmatic, known but unknown. It is this place that the paintings attempt to inhabit.

—Tim Craighead