Susan Maasch Fine Art
gallery artists
Clint Fulkerson
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Artist Statement:
I create my artwork through the slow application of decisive marks. As I draw, I follow a loose formula based on what I've already drawn, filling areas of the picture plane gradually, without making initial layout sketches. This makes the final product somewhat unexpected and emergent. It is doodling with restraint. Lines build up into geometric shapes and patterns of varying density and scale to "grow" forms that look organic. Shapes push and pack in organized clusters, accumulating in ways analogous to the growth of cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and communities. I investigate natural phenomena and I attempt to describe my limited understanding of them using a visual mathematical language. Patterns found in nature depend primarily on physical properties common to all matter, organic and inorganic. I am particularly inspired by this passage from the introduction of The Mechanism of Life by Stephane Leduc, written in 1911:
Life is difficult to define because it differs from one living being to another; the life of a man is not that of a polyp or of a plant, and if we find it impossible to discover the line which separates life from the other phenomena of Nature, it is in fact because no such line of demarcation exists---the passage from animate to inanimate is gradual and insensible. The step between a stalagmite and a polyp is less than that between a polyp and man, and even the trained biologist is often at a loss to determine whether a given borderland form is the result of life, or of the inanimate forces of the mineral world.
D'Arcy Thompson wrote that "physical forces are capable of producing particular organic forms" in On Growth and Form. My hope is that by the proper application of my energy to my art materials, I could potentially make an object that rivals the elegance of a life form. Printmaking allows the reproduction of a piece and also the variation or changes between impressions, which I find comparable to biological reproduction and evolution.