E. Charles Rolwing III

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” Bukowski-

A bi-polar carnival in the trailing remains of a life unruly. Discourse running simultaneously from hot to cold. My need is to be emotionally as well as intellectually honest in my work. To avoid the obvious and the ‘artistic’. To mine the subconscious and all the alluvial deposits. But the life of the artist is criminal. It is a breaking out of the artistic norm, the white cube, the authoritarian aesthetic, to avoid the popular trends and fashion. Seeking out the non traditional space for a non traditional vision. The painting is a conglomeration of the flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of Americana. Symbols float in the space of my mind snatched from the air. Careful, gentle discernment. Novelties. A dreamscape reality of confusing dimensions. The grid quantifies known space. A mathematical measuring of the natural world for mass division. The all encompassing consumerism gagging on it’s own demographic. All is in things. Once we have pruned all the trees, and tamed the weeds, acre by acre, the wholesale home decoration for a society made up of avarice and greed. We are all the Mouseketeer trying to regain a mythical childhood. We are but children. Religion is replaced by football and three card monte. I’m a damn rebel. I might start a brawl, I might bring it all down. I am a small time art grifter filling the souls of those searching, swimming in the gewgaw tide of souvenirs. A small time pool shark hustling the daily bread on false prayers and paint. I Am the corporation with no compunction to feed the belly of self fulfilling promise. A broken ribbed umbrella, a disembodied head, tears run down a thread, empty voice bubbles, an oil rig like a Ferris wheel sparkling lights in the darkness. Bombs for everyone, bullets for the poolside unserved. Pop expressionist artifice bathed in self denial. The painting is not the illustration of an idea, it is the idea itself. It is not a linear experience. The language of the soul, a Sisyphean deal with death at the end of the journey. Guston, Basquiat, Baselitz, and Freud are the masters here, as well as The acquaintance, tempera on paper (the novels of McCarthy, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It is all human comedy. It is all in colors. It’s an empty birdcage.