!! NEW SHOW !!
A-Town & Backdown
- ARTIST STATEMENT -
Thirty-seven years ago and the influx of moments leading up to this one, my lulling days in utero came careening to an end. Buoyant weightlessness ebbed, meeting discursive waves of murmurs. In a rush, space flowed, muffles crested to a torrent of pitch perfect sounds. Then first light came and with it unprecedented sensations. I was flabbergasted, a panoply of colors, up and down, open space! There, a woman in a white lab coat, or through new eyes, a waterfall of energy approached. A spank and my lungs filled with a something open, ebullient, not embryonic. Life comes online in singularity. In the following search for clarity art has been a singular friend to me. Art has always been the vehicle I am able to communicate with. Zooming out to the present, I find myself teaching, doing and searching.
Telescoping through time and space looking for a formal focus for the show it was clear to me it had to be the four places that have meant the most to me - Arcata, Eureka,Oakland and San Francisco - were the settings. The spirit of the show would be the people, classic cars and emergent forces animating those places.
Humboldt County will always be home to me and today I see it going through a shift that the Bay Area did way, way back. Long been behind the redwood curtain and the last vestige of the wild west the county is now on the verge of becoming something new. With its economic backbone of cannabis all but evaporated it's in the lurch, on the cusp of transitioning to a knowledge-based economy. Not that the classic resource driven economies are gone - fish, timber, and gold mining on through history - but they are all cottage industries now. With the university and world changing how will the area holds onto the outlaw cultural values, Doing it yourself, community self-reliance, living outside the law while being honest, the antiestablishment spirit? One thing is certain the area is staged to reinvent itself like never before.
But much of my adult life has been in The Bay which is near but not always dear to me. It transitory, people come and go. The environment comes forward though time though, it is almost friend to me now, almost. I see buildings in visual art like the music in a movie. Their scale and scope create space that leads into human dramas. Grandeur and stone are of special interest to me such as churches and governmental buildings. Their neo-classical thresholds and vaulted friezes say this place matters and when you enter here so do you. What happens next is significant.
At the bottom of each piece is the longitude and latitude, in Porsche font, the literal. This is bracketed by coins flipping which represents the spiritual. Coin tosses are serious business in society, ball possession in professional sports are determined this way. Higher stakes still, in the UK tied parliamentary elections are decided by a coin toss! A moment of happenstance that we hold sacred. Place and meaning, yin and yang. In typography italics indicate spirit which is why the coins are angled.
Viewers' respond to technique so in this series I focus in on getting as close to representationalism as I am capable. People are not always intuitive but every time I set up in public spaces to draw or paint people light up and share stories with me about their lives and love for art. I think that this says something really beautiful about our shared values. I am looking forward to hearing about you
I hope that you enjoy these works and thank you so much for reading.
- BIOGRAPHY -
Julian DeMark was born and raised in Arcata California. He comes from a family of musicians, artisans, educators and factory workers. Received his degree in Fine Art from Humboldt State and worked in manufacturing as a screen printer, graphic designer and engraver at the US Mint. He is currently earning his MFA in Comic Books from CCA in San Francisco and teaches art at UC Berkeley. His works often focus on architecture, dynamic perspectives, human anatomy, and classic cars, often a little cooked and always chalked full of details.
