Eric Erekson

Imagine the earliest human hands making marks and then see these many hands throughout time transforming marks and strokes into images, leaving our oldest inscribed history. My paintings are a dialogue between longstanding practices and new technological ways of leaving marks and strokes, a bridge linking past to present.

Appropriating and combining content from the Internet I create permutations that deviate from the equalized world of data and are given new life, depth and meaning. This carries out a dialogue between the immediate world of images delivered online and the methodical decisions made by hand, showing a visual record of human to machine and machine to human communication. I like to make sure that the history of this dialogue is not lost but a tangible history of actions.

Innovation is not a replacement for what I do. Like all artists within my lineage of art making, technology offers new tools to amplify and complete our expressions. Using advancement as a form of liberation and opportunity for further exploration. It also adds to the content by expressing the condition of current world practices and the new filters we view the world through. Formal understanding of materials and their uses are important to the artists delivery, and technology is a component of the Formal Elements in contemporary as well as historical art. The search for the new is as old as humanity, each innovation reinvents art practices by comparison renewing them with every step forward.

Through many trials I have reached this destination within my work. Years of creativity culminating at this point. My work uses a number of inspirational concepts including; the contemporary figure, ideals, life experience, gender differences/indifferences, mutual existence and most recently class separation through exploitation of opulence and its impact on the art world.

Underlying key point; I paint what I want however I want, embedding my work with a love and passion for being human. Whatever that might mean.