“Otto Rank defined the artist as one who wants to leave behind a gift. Our gifts say ‘thank you’ to life.”
Tom Heuerman, Blog, June 8, 2013
“As sin is the separation from and the destruction of community and therefore of personality, so is faith the
integration into and the reconstruction of community. The proper antithesis is between sin and faith. Sin is the
closedness which bears the fruits of wicked actions, whereas faith is the openness which flowers into the
complete fullness of communal life.” John Rawls: A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin & Faith, 2009
“Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.” Adam Gopnik on
Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, New Yorker, June 24, 2024
I am a skeptical pragmatist with idealistic tendencies. While art is fulfilling, in the deepest sense, it is but a
fleeting diversion— at best, a transitory moment of grace…
My life is a poem punctuated by paintings, pictures, and the people around me. My youthful experience
of Buffalo’s institutions is responsible for my structure of intentionality.
My art grows out of the bottomless abyss of myself and is trajectorized by the infinite universe of
ultimacy—the protagonistic spirit ascending from cosmic indifference.
My concerns are the germination of ideas and the determination of humanistic values, particularly in
relation to imagistic functionality, as in pareidolia.
I sense “artist-hood” as Hegel’s “spirit,” “…which refers to a self-aware, self-reflective, and all-encompassing force
that is the essence of reality, manifesting through individual consciousness, societal institutions, and the unfolding
of history, essentially representing the collective human mind and its ongoing process of self-understanding
and development through dialectical progression; it is not a separate, ethereal entity but rather
the very fabric of reality itself.” AI overview
“A serious work of art brings art history into the present. And it gives us an idea of the painter’s being… There is
one more thing that a serious artwork does. Offering parallels and contrasts with other interesting works, it forms
connections that complicate and thereby enrich the entire ecosystem. As these connections proliferate, the
art world becomes a diverse and balanced environment where meaning flourishes.”
Carter Ratcliff: Art and Invasive Species, Substack, Dec 11, 2024
My paintings’ content is the look of each work shuffled with the apparent contexts, like “the painterly;” where it is;
where it was made, when it was made; photos and texts made adjacently; psychic, emotional, and spiritual contexts;
imagistic functionality: representation, abstraction, symbolization, gestural abstraction, structuralist semiotic
synthesis; historic movements: Post-impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract
expressionism, Color-field painting, post-Richter/Hodgkins painting—the phenomenology of how
the paint sits on the painting…manifesting the tragedy of the commodification of spirit.
I pour and blot and inflect the colors of paint until imagination is realized through chance—play until recognition
takes form—to achieve some kind of intuited isomorphism in sublime tumult—
a “naturishness” that segues with consciousness.
In the face of geological inscrutability, I have a sense of enriched cultural tokenism insofar as artistic intention
leverages an economy of modest means to superlative effect—i.e. the work is modest, the intention is not.
Clufffalo connotes the permeability of the authorial threshold…and Pepfog, the photographic epic of
a painter as a film or a ghost, stakes my fossil self in vivid fact!
The Political Value of Art is Beauty as a Symbol of Love!
The Clufffalo YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@pepfogclufff
In the Archive, The Photographic Epic of a Painter as a Film or a Ghost, 2007, offers an introduction to my work,
and “Clufffalo: Complete,” is an account of the period of 2014-2024.
To purchase paintings, view PDFs in the Archive and then Contact me—Thank you!