Artist Statement

Artist Statement – Physics & Metaphysics, The Body & Mind, Light & Spirituality

No subject matter is off limits, and it is too chaotic to carry forth the ideals of Marcel Duchamp in our times. In a time when art was not a game, he became the Joker card. I have used ready-made materials for one artwork in my lifetime, out of love for God, and for Taylor Swift. I avoid ready-made materials as I prefer the individually handmade altering of base properties such as paint and charcoal to create paintings and drawings.

Art, to me, must involve the alteration of materials beyond decisions of context to define them. Associative meanings are controlled in favor of direct responses this way. Sincerity over irony in my work, as appropriation and association brings on heavy baggage in terms of artistic languages – often historical and contemporary references are not known or understood by uneducated viewers of art. 

In our current political arena, it is left versus right. A strictly dualistic thought patterning stems from the days, communicatively. I don’t often think along diametric lines as I am an artist and poet, yet, to get along in this world one must recognize systematic thinking to have a dialogue with the people through governments. That is, if one hopes for change in his own times. 

In Marcel Duchamp’s lecture and essay of the same title, The Creative Act, he relied on the spectator to complete works of art. I do not. Once I am satisfied within the confines of a studio my works of art are finished by me alone. My art does not need an audience to transcend time and space, or place and meaning, I am enough. They do need an audience to affect direct change physically on a broader scale, no matter the year it is, as they are physical objects first and understood metaphysically second.

I have written books such as, Twonism and Twonism II, which stand for an understanding of material forms imbued by immaterial thoughts guided by love from within a life of discovery and individuality bound by interconnectedness. In my book, Spiralchemation, I have attempted to explain some of my work systematically through its transmutations of shape-based feelings, emotions, behaviors, moods, light, color, and notes. 

All of my work is involved in sublimation, even the most rote looking abstractions of mine wherein a single shape lies upon a solid ground or atmospheric void. Through color, the simple forms give life to complexity and express metaphysical worlds that both expand and are contained physically and metaphysically. Thought moves forward and so too does influence via real life experiences and inspirations. 

I receive positive and negative inspirations physically and mentally, externally and internally. Physically through my senses, and mentally through vision and sound. 

Perhaps it’s my last name, Freed, I was born into, but at a very early age I knew art was and is about liberties not granted people in other ways. This is my offering to our world, progressively, through my artwork. Even the most realistic art is understood through nonobjective means, in my opinion, that is… through the culmination of our sensory faculties of feelings and emotions, knowledge and understanding. This is my communication of love and wisdom in its most profound way. This is why I choose to continue to exhibit. 

Contrast makes life a painting to me! You break free from the nuanced blending of forms and abutment of different colors and shapes within the paintings and are suspended for a time within emotional thought. It is a subtle and slowly enveloping feeling of empowering joy, at most times, and is more sophisticated in response than this, it seems to me. My greatest work has been done through doing and contemplation, not through a single lined aesthetic, but through contrasting styles that have resulted in outcomes of peace and harmony, contentment near and far, happiness, sadness, and discord. Structure is the beginning and the end. This is to say the paintings must be acceptable to my whole being from the start and most certainly at the finish.

—Damon Jared Freed