My Statement!
Pablo Picasso once said “Good artists copy, Great artists steal” ...It means you may not be the first to try something, but you did it so well that everyone thinks of you when they see that style. Like Picasso, Liechtenstein, Monet, Van Gogh…they may have started out coping someone else, but in the end they completely stole it.
I am quite often asked the question "Why do you paint Mickey Mouse & the Phantom?"…
I do not work with either Mickey Mouse, The Phantom, The Batman or any of the other famous cartoon characters, but with the significance the world of comics had and has had on me through childhood. What significance does it still have on me? I caricature, parody and portray characters and stories, and then braids it all together with memories from my own childhood. I’m playing with emotions they still evoke in me! Forgotten memories that reappear! I'm playing with the fantasies I walked around with at that preticular time in life! And perhaps most important of all - I'm playing with what is still left of me, the original me, from back then when I was a kid!?
Just think how important this, the comics, has been to people! That even now, 50 years after his death, Walt Disney is perhaps the foremost symbol of American culture, and it would have been difficult at all to imagine a world without what he and others with him created.
My artwork is a kind of tribute! And they are (kind of..) a tribute to all those who shaped my childhood and my imagination through their fantasies, colors and wonders, and in that way shaped me further to who I am today. To what I was, and what I have become!
I do not work with either Mickey Mouse, The Phantom, The Batman or any of the other famous cartoon characters, but with the significance the world of comics had and has had on me through childhood. What significance does it still have on me? I caricature, parody and portray characters and stories, and then braids it all together with memories from my own childhood. I’m playing with emotions they still evoke in me! Forgotten memories that reappear! I'm playing with the fantasies I walked around with at that preticular time in life! And perhaps most important of all - I'm playing with what is still left of me, the original me, from back then when I was a kid!?
Just think how important this, the comics, has been to people! That even now, 50 years after his death, Walt Disney is perhaps the foremost symbol of American culture, and it would have been difficult at all to imagine a world without what he and others with him created.
My artwork is a kind of tribute! And they are (kind of..) a tribute to all those who shaped my childhood and my imagination through their fantasies, colors and wonders, and in that way shaped me further to who I am today. To what I was, and what I have become!