Artist Statement:
My paintings reflect my fascination with the beauty found in the interaction between perception, painting, and the natural environment. Beauty is created when a composition achieves a balance within the tension between contrasting forms and stylistic representations. This tension emerges when a composition encompasses a myriad of formal elements. When the inner forces of the tension are particularly dynamic, a painting explodes with sensations; that is profound sentiments are produced from a clash between visual energies and stylistic descriptions.Separate but interwoven fragments of representations provide the viewer with many ways to perceive a landscape. The various parts of my paintings can be viewed differently depending upon the focal point. As the viewer's focus changes, the separate fragments rearrange to form new, unified, patterns and spaces, causing him/her to perceive different realities. One's reality is thus formed by his/her perception, which is subsequently shaped by a multitude of different factors occurring simultaneously. Each of these factors is employed to alert the viewer of the existence of numerous perspectives and realities. Perception isn't exclusively molded by the visual experience. Psychological activity, both conscious and subconscious, stimulated through the emphasized use of abstract patterns, gestalt effects, and the illusions of after images and the entopic phenomena, equally shapes the viewer's reality.
Formal elements are manipulated to generate the cerebral activity. Various contrasting transitions and combinations between formal elements such as light and dark, warm and cool, fast and slow, and rough and smooth, directly affect human emotions such as happy and sad, good and evil, anxious and calm, and sarcastic and serious. The array of forms functioning together thoroughly accesses the spectrum of human emotion.
Through the blending of stylistic representations and formal elements, my paintings are meant to engender active thought and intense emotion on the part of the viewer. He/she is presented with infinite realities, whose mingling ultimately illustrates a microcosm of the natural environment.
Woody Shepherd, artist statement 2006