STATEMENT: Paintings
The Landscape & Architecture of the Mind
The mind is an ever-extending landscape with hills and valleys
of experience, fertile and desolate regions. It unfolds continuously as one
travels across its intricacies, towards the horizon. Like our physical experience,
the landscape of the mind is scattered with an architecture, the architecture
of idea and thought: structures, and objects animated by an unseen energy force,
are constantly repositioning, reconstructing, recreating.
There is a fantastic weather here: fiery gold skies, icy strands of winter wind,
multiple scorching suns, torrential downpour, a dark moon, seas of infinite
profundity. The landscape itself is alive, in a state of evolution and revolution,
morphing in color, structure and presence or absence. It represents the constant
cycle and recycle of thought and idea. Ruptures, fissures in the sky and ground
simply lead to another parallel landscape and so on, this sub-reality extends
infinitely in every direction.
My paintings seek to express this landscape experience, the dialogue between
the dreamscape and consciousness, at
times viewed from a wide angle, at times macro detail; snapshots of an ever-shifting
mental architecture: the experience of life with its moments of joy and pain,
exuberance and despair...an inner reflection of the external chaos around us.
We all go through it but the artist dares to discuss it.
I am compelled to create; it is an instinct more powerful than my own will that
has driven me since I was very young. Life is for me, at times, painfully inspiring.
My greatest frustration is knowing that my existence is simply not enough to
execute all of the ideas that haunt me.
Joseph Mross
February
2003
Images and designs copyright Joseph Mross 2002