My painting technique has been developed over many years of research and practical application. My researches in painting have always followed a type of philosophical method centered on an autobiographical journey combined with the understanding of the world around me as it has been revealed through science. My explorations of the art of the 1960s and 1970s led me to question the pedagogical methods for teaching art at the time and caused me to wonder what was at its root. This led me into art history and eventually into a deep study of the Renaissance. For the past twenty-six years I have taught drawing, art history and painting, and have learned much about the world of art. My view has been opened wide. My studies of the historical, scientific and political underpinnings of art have armed me with a vast body from which to cull and mix ideas. Sometimes these ideas are derived from the subjects of my study, but at other times they come to me as visions from the sub-conscious and deeper, reflecting concerns that not even I am consciously privy to, though I get glimpses that convince me of their self-reflective character.
My art has unfolded over the years from a more traditionally academic and optically realistic approach to depicting form, to one reflecting my fascinations with such areas of thought as sub-atomic particle physics (though I am no mathematician), astronomy, geology, evolution, physiology, psychology, mythology, religion and history. Until recently I have never tried to define my art through a formal style based on specific ideological parameters, but instead have chosen to approach each new work as an opportunity to explore new avenues of the visual syntax. A strong respect for the methods and modes of painting in the Western Tradition, including a the more experimental variants of the 20th century, have opened a broad vista in which I feel comfortably at play with the disparate elements, but from which I have never been committed to a particular movement or style. I have followed the path laid out in Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Metamorphosis’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, of 1885.
The painting technique of my works of the past few years has developed from my study of popular science on evolution, astronomy, string theory and quantum evolution. The idea that light reflects aspects of both a point and a wave, that physicists ponder dimensions billions of times smaller than the atomic structures, that physiology operates in the sub-atomic realm, that the matter of the cosmos rose from a vacuum and that space is a function of time, have led me to return to the Futurist works of the Italian artist Umberto Boccioni. His view of matter as energy expressed as radiant light depicted through discrete brush strokes has always fascinated me. I first ventured in this direction in the large painting Satyr’s Dance of 1999. The push/pull of cool verses warm colors led me to attempt to maximize the space through subtle gradations of tone. In the last few years I have explored this potential in a series of paintings based on the idea of the discrete stroke as the artistic equivalent of Max Plank’s ‘quantum’. Quantum mechanics suggests behaviors that contradict logic and order introducing randomness and chaos as agents of creation. Matter fuses with space and energy is released. Energy transforms inert matter and life arises. Ideas transform inert minds and art arises.
© 2014 Richard David Serros: Artist, Designer and Art Historian
