GARY HORN

"My work is rooted in the narrative traditions of the arts, using a variety of traditional drawing, painting, and printing techniques and media.  My greatest progress has not come from the study of art, but rather through the study of the creative process. 

While in the process of creating a work of art, I am more attentive to art’s tradition than to personal style, as I understand art to be an entity unto itself, existing for its own reasons and purpose, with the artist acting as merely a vehicle through which the art itself comes into being.  Given this, my approach can best be characterized as fusionist.  Fusing the elements of various artistic movements and concepts offers me a wider variety of stylistic choices and allows me to create for art’s reasons rather than for my own.

 I create dialogues, not pictures.  The dialogue first emerges into consciousness through the complementary actions of altered awareness and metacognition.  The dialogue’s emanating source is a combination of personal experience and experiential interpretations of the many and varied resources I actively pursue specifically for the purpose of making and improving my art. 

The initial dialogue is not a conscious choice, but one that presents itself for the purpose of being created.  It is my task to discover what the art wants of me and how best to utilize my practiced skills and learned patterns of construction to facilitate the art’s existence.  The art begins with a skeletal idea of theme and a working title. It is only through the working dialogue of ideas, abilities, and limitations of skill and medium that the full meaning of the artwork and its title becomes known. 

Upon concluding the work of art, I collect my thoughts and create a written translation of the visual narrative.  This allows me to obtain closure and distance from the artwork while providing viewers with a point of entry into a dialogue of their own with the work of art."