Josef DeVoogd

Whether I’m painting, printing, or making a comic, I embrace the preposterous. My simplistic creative reasoning is my guide to exploring a transcendental realm of thought. I’m inspired in my painting to use color and let the process guide me to find a story and purpose. When painting in a surrealist style, with sufficient planning, my symbols are carefully chosen to jog the mind in a certain direction. In my piece Holey, I use bright colors and light to bring to the core of the painting. Once you are settled there, you will find the stories of broken lives and hidden complexity on the margins. Much of the imagery for my paintings or prints come from within. They are based on visions and emotions that surface in a dream or day dream or in a beauty setting in nature.

I enjoy rooting out hypocrisy and illogical reasoning in popular thought, to give people a more accurate perspective on things like their own mortality or the forces that form our understanding of the world. Typically, if I’m making a comic illustration it’s socially and politically driven. I get my inspiration for these comics based on my own interpretation of the absurdity of reality.

I find a lot of enticing images on the internet and would be good subject material that can be reinterpreted into more meaningful work. Micro-metals is a good example of this where I worked from a photograph and recast it into a completely different piece.

Art is waiting to be seen, in all places large and small. It provides me full meaning and life when I’m in the process of learning about myself in a piece of work. I invite others to find their own meaning in my work and hope it adds to their lives.

40,000 + years ago, a small tribe of our ancestors extracted dyes from plants. They went into caverns and with crude straws they created tracings of their own hands upon the walls. They also painted the beasts of the land and the ritual hunt. I often wonder about these fledgling bands of people with no physiological need for such paintings. Since What was necessary for these people basically was security, shelter, food, warmth; why then would they spend time painting steer and tracing their hands on a wall? I like to believe that they were conscious about their own mortality and wanted to send into the future, a statement: “WE WERE HERE, AND WE MATTERED.” It is in the same spirit that I create my artwork. If you look closely you’ll notice my trademark signature is in the shape of a hand as my connection to the past and a statement into the future. Life is short, art is not.