About My Art Practice

I work in different genres at the same time. I create rules within those genres and then play vigorously within those parameters. My specialty is playing with new materials as seriously as possible. Then I push that combo until I exhaust it. 

For example, a current capsule of mine is called Black Holes. This series consists of silhouetted figures immersed in wildly abstracted backgrounds, a sort of neo-portraiture. They are extremely tactile. They're individualized portraits, but universal, specific yet general, and the figure also exists simply as a hangar to hang a painting on.

Another's called Soul Kitchen, a collection of floor pieces made of foundational materials such as stone, wood, and steel. In this case, vintage stone relics are repaired and ‘healed’ like Kintsugi and presented in a novel and elegant fashion. 

Another's called Instruments of Agency, which consists of vintage propellers, oars, and skateboards painted and repurposed with nitrocellulose, which is the material that makes nail polish look so cool. 

Certain themes run through my work, such as natural history (living things and artifacts from the natural world as subject), recycling (I often use a lot of found materials in my practice such as blister packs and driftwood — from trinkets to transcendence), archaeology (inherited histories, layered time), and concentric rings (mandalas as doorways to essences).

— Steve Sas Schwartz