AARON FELTMAN

Statement

In this selection of works, I wanted to give a glimpse into the early stages of my process. Within the preparatory stage, I allow myself to work freely from my head- exploring ideas of love, tenderness, and touch through the limited means of pen on paper. While these drawings may evolve into more resolved paintings, I have come to appreciate the immediacy of an idea which can be felt through a simple sketch. I then go on to make some smaller color studies to understand the overall color scheme of the final painting. While I tend to work at a larger scale for my finished paintings, recently, I have been interested in devoting time to smaller works. Within this scale, the marks of my brush may get smaller while simultaneously taking up a larger amount of the painting’s surface. I am working on finding ways to allow for these marks to grow in proportion to the scale of my paintings while preserving the fluidity of my drawn mark. I have begun to incorporate unifying washes of paint into my process to build up color in layers, allowing for more density and depth while also disrupting the image and allowing for unexpected color variations to arise. Within these works I am exploring proximity as a metaphor for psychological closeness and the ways in which this distance becomes disrupted or obscured. The figures are beginning to emerge out of the color grounds on which they lay, mirroring this collapsing of space and distance.