--Artist Statement--

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Dear Reader,

Thanks for stopping by my little shaded corner of the web, if you've clicked here then you're probably a little interested in my work and would like to find out more about it's process and what motivates me to create them.

My illustrative works are a continual study of the human psychological condition. Through it, I represent my personal observations and commentaries, sometimes regarding my own experiences and sometimes depicting social psychological tendencies and patterns. They are my views and interpretations of the world around me and myself as a living creature trying to find my place on a planet where the quest for meaning has ironically lost its meaning.
These images are created by a constant blending and marriage of traditional and digital mediums and composing the pieces within Photoshop. While I work, the traditional elements are scanned or photographed, then digitally processed, broken down, then recomposed with the digital elements to create each image.
Creating these works can be a very lonely, personally confronting and intensely internal environment. You learn a lot about yourself but it's important to step out of that place from time to time. That's where photography comes in.

Photography for me is an escape. Escape from the confines of creating my illustrations, escape from social stigma. There is nothing more pleasing for me than being in the middle of nowhere, immersed entirely in the beauty of nature living it's life, completely isolated from the shallow bitchiness and judgments of humans. Photography allows me to disregard time and simply experience that particular environment. I find myself staring into the flow of a stream for hours on end, wishing that I could be a leaf floating in the water, going where it takes me with no sense of consequence or social responsibility. No one to say I'm not good enough, not smart enough, not attractive enough.
I love macro photography, the feeling of isolating and giving meaning to the smaller things we walk passed every day yet never acknowledge. In 2007 I began experimenting with infrared photography, which has given me a much greater scope of appreciation for everything around us. Everything seems to jump out at you when looking through an IR camera. I begin crawling around the ground, capturing everything in my path. The beauty of photography is that it isn't bias in what it captures. It has no sense of what is or isn't important, it captures everything "as is" without passing judgment or ignorance toward a subject. It has no passed memory of that place or that object. Sometimes we take a photo of something we think of as being beautiful, but when we look at the print it can often be not as we experienced that beauty in that space and atmosphere at that period of time. I like to photograph things that I find beautiful and discard what others perceive as being beauty. If I see beauty in it, I will capture it.

I hope you enjoy your visit.

- CG

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