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I am a painter, but I have roots in comics and illustration. I decided at some point that I needed to merge these modes of expression into one hybrid form. Since I want to make paintings and drawings of a linear, serial nature, I have created recurring characters and adapted the narrative format of the graphic novel as my framework. This allows me a certain amount of directorial distance from my process. Like the gods in Clash of the Titans, I can look down upon my characters, rearrange them and plan their fates. The elastic boundaries of this new working model allow me to incorporate different media, textures and techniques. |
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
I am a painter, but I have roots in comics and illustration. I decided at some point that I needed to merge these modes of expression into one hybrid form. Since I want to make paintings and drawings of a linear, serial nature, I have created recurring characters and adapted the narrative format of the graphic novel as my framework. This allows me a certain amount of directorial distance from my process. Like the gods in Clash of the Titans, I can look down upon my characters, rearrange them and plan their fates. The elastic boundaries of this new working model allow me to incorporate different media, textures and techniques.
I put images to work in many different ways, both as single, iconic forms and modular forms used for building. These modes of representation are exemplified in the paintings, Aborted but Beautiful, a depiction of a single hand, and The Third to the Last Big Hurrah, which depicts dozens of hands that form a kind of lattice worked tapestry. I get a certain amount of gratification from watching a form duplicate, multiply and coagulate into a singular unit again. It’s like comparing the tree to the forest or the bee to the swarm.
My studio is based on organic branching, both literally and figuratively. That is to say that image begets image. Each subsequent image is usually a result of a previous image, but every once in a while, something new and foreign is assimilated into the lexicon. This new element may be an image, a color or a material. The challenge then becomes how to weave the new element into a harmonious composition. Sometimes it quite simply doesn’t work out, and the new comer is extradited through a process of natural selection. This is also the case for images that were once potent but that, over time, ran their course. These images are usually not forgotten, but lay dormant, waiting to be rediscovered or reimagined.
Exploiting the strangeness borne out of recontextualization is a way to breathe new life into an image. We are conditioned to believe foot is at the end of leg. Well, what if you took off your shoe and saw a frog or a mailbox? By collaging form over form, I use the surrealist exquisite corpse method to help me to arrive at new hybrid forms. Re-contextualizing a familiar image often leads to new revelations about the image’s potential.
