Artist's Statement

THE BALANCING ACT KNOWN AS ABSTRACT PAINTING         

     The paintings come from a need to expand my experience of life into a pure formal kind of abstraction. For me the language of abstract painting seems to be the best way to capture the element that evokes the sublime.

     The initial source material for my paintings can be anything from a news article, images of plant life, data visualization sets, maps of coastal regions, or derived from art, science, and music.

     As a painter of abstraction and mostly pure form, my artistic concerns are felt, tested, and discovered directly on the canvas and in my gut.  

As the formal textures flow and change over days and weeks, the challenge becomes to slow down a bit and listen and see more deeply. The essential strengths and core of the abstraction get revealed the longer the oil paintings are worked on.

    The artistic dialog seems to be a feedback loop. Work is created by taking hints and cues from the process. It becomes part of the inevitable critique and a visual conversation with the paintings that came before it.

    Artistic discoveries cause me to backtrack and reassess, sometimes continuously formulating, viewing, rearranging… it is this characteristic of abstraction that I cherish the most.

Jeffrey Paul Riley, Santa Fe, NM. 2020