first question

As to a question, do you have a sense of your preferred audience(s) for your art work? Are there particular people with whom you'd like your work to be in conversation? What are those conversations? This one is from Pete at clarkelane.com

Ouch, what a hard first one to answer!

Preferred audience is a hard thing to for me to define. Yes I would like to say that there are many types of people I would like for completely selfish reasons, meaning people who want to buy or display my work, for goodness sake what am I going to do with 100 or 1000 paintings after all. It is important to me though, that people can see and appreciate the art that I am creating and I can inspire and challenge people, make them think or take action is my real goal. As a result, the real preferred audience would then be anyone willing to be a viewer taking in what they can from the work.

I gave up a long time ago thinking about the type of person that my work might talk too, there are to many times that people I would not expect to like a certain work ends up loving it and visa versa. It is hard to judge what peoples real experiences are so I take it all in stride. With that said though, I will talk about the audience in more generic terms. I want my work to talk to the people who can feel that gut/raw emotional reaction that I infuse in my work (or try to infuse). Sensual but edgy, not quite disturbing but not quite overtly happy either, humanistic is a good word. Really what living is about. You know that very outwardly happy person, and you look at them and you see that spark of pain around their eyes or mouth or in their body language like there is something going on but you can’t put your finger on it. That is what I am talking about. So the conversation with the audience is to evoke those same feeling that of one overlying emotion but have some subtle emotion that they can explore a little farther, maybe even pulling memories and experiences out of them to enhance that emotion.

Not sure if this answers anything or brings up more questions, but thanks for such a challenge and playing along.

Don’t forget that you to and ask my anything you want to, see the bottom of this post for details!