5 x 5 Submission 54 - Brian Cypher

Brian Cypher
Brian Cypher's website
BIOGRAPHY
I spent my adolescence in Anacortes, WA after moving there from San Diego. My inclinations about being an artist had always been present throughout my life but really took hold of me when I was 16 after seeing a girlfriend's mother's art studio. I knew at that point that my immediate step was to have a space of my own to create in. I quickly established a loft studio in downtown Anacortes and it became my own personal school of art. I never did feel the need to acquire a Fine Art degree. For me, art was just who I was and that in itself was all I needed to continue on my creative path. It's been nearly twenty years since I started painting and there's nothing I would rather be doing then searching for that next image. I have exhibited my work off and on during that time and most recently received representation from the Catherine Person Gallery in Seattle.

ARTIST STATEMENT
My recent artwork (and like all work before it) is simply driven by intuitive gestures and mark marking. I'm searching for an exactitude by hand but I don't want perfection in my lines. I like experimenting with a figure / ground relationship that isn't always known or apparent. I'm pushing and pulling lines and shapes from gestures, creating incidental moiré patterns and oscillations.

Ideas are found through the observation of my environment and from the process of drawing and painting. I let experimentation drive me intuitively with the understanding that there is an interaction taking place between what I see and what I want to see. I work from shapes and forms that are both visible and invisible. I rely on an accumulated iconographic lexicon of ideas, shapes, and forms that are personal. There is a certain level of obsession that is required to continually investigate questions for which there are no answers; only visual clues to a landscape of filtered thoughts.

Over the years, I’ve learned to accept what I create for what it is. It’s my language and my relationship. In the end, I’m merely forming a connection between what I’ve thought about and what I’m going to create.