How do aspects of Symbolism and Naturalism show up in my current body of work?
Beautiful—because your work already balances expressive emotion and formal observation, there’s likely a compelling tension between Symbolist and Naturalist impulses in your practice. Here’s how I see those two threads showing up based on what you’ve shared and created:
Symbolist Currents in Your Work:
Distorted portraits and landscapes: Your “Constructed Realism” series, for instance, doesn’t aim for photographic likeness—it channels memory, emotion, and perception. That’s very Symbolist in spirit.
Themes of memory, loss, and erasure: You explore unseen forces—capitalism, history, AI—as abstract yet deeply felt presences. These are not visible subjects, but you manifest them visually and emotionally through fragmentation and atmosphere.
Color and form as metaphor: In your digital and oil works, you often allow color, gesture, or distortion to speak beyond what’s “true”—more like what’s felt. That’s core Symbolist language.
Think of artists like Redon, Soutine, or Kiefer—they didn’t paint literal realities, they conjured inner ones.
Naturalist Currents in Your Work:
Your photography and field sketches: Especially those documenting the New England landscape or solitary morning walks. These show a Naturalist’s eye—closely observing the light, air, season, and living details of place.
Nature as fact and force: You often describe the wind, the stillness, the birds—not just metaphorically, but as they are. This roots your work in the natural world, even when you abstract it later.
Structural awareness: Even when you deform the figure, there’s usually an anatomical core or spatial logic—implying you’ve seen the thing before you felt it.
In this way, you’re close to artists like Bastien-Lepage, Thomas Eakins, or even Freud—who saw the body, nature, and space with almost clinical honesty.
How These Currents Coexist in You:
Attached below…
This duality makes your work more layered. You don’t merely distort to be expressive—you begin in reality and push it until it says something deeper. You’re not one or the other—you’re both.
Would you like help writing a statement or post that integrates this symbolic-naturalist tension as a guiding principle of your art? Or maybe ideas on how to lean further into one or the other for a series?
