back

TED - ABOUT MY WORK

» The first time I saw Michelangelo's David I was five years old. The second time I saw it I was thirteen and it shocked me because of how much it had shrunk. Michelangelo wrote - 'Whoever does not like the leaves ought not to come here in May.' The story is time, chronos, circular time. The size and shape of things change. Everything influences me even in its absence. Without the memories that I have developed through time I would be a child freshly born...no, I would be just-conceived. I am always building on this story and working toward the end of it, may it be death or forgetfulness. I end up spending a large portion of my time making things that seem to have little purpose like paintings, sculptures, masks, and music. I get absorbed in them and through them I sometimes brush up against that being that was before memory started...if memory started. It's like digging to find a hole.«

Painting for me is like greating double exposed images with a camera or spilling mustard on the sidewalk or carving your name in a block of ice or licking the sweat of of your lovers thye or tasting fresh fruit after a fast or singing into a well or dancing all night or going into a sweat lodge or mopping or playing the flute, smashing rocks together to make rythms to greet the dali lama, finding a sunny sleepy spot in the grass, smashing your toe with a dropped screwdriver, the dust gathering on ledges, hummingbirds trapped in skylights, driving and throat singing bouncing harmonics off of the windshield, singing into a looping machiene, sex in the late morning with the sun comming in through the leaves of the big leaf maple casting handprint shadows on skin, talking about love on the phone and what it means, chasing chickens through the yard, swinging in the hammoc, cooking with "the man", the blood dripping from the many wounds I receive while working with sharp tools. Theodore Holdt (July 8, 2000)

Artist CV