notes. Selections from the 2022 Senior Seminar
John Zahran-Colon
My paintings use personal experience that is reconfigured into new realities through soft color and cartoon-like form. Recurring references such as cats, cigarettes, and vessels are motifs that instigate a perceptive clash between what we know and what is imagined. How this dissonance heightens the viewer's awareness of the objects —particularly in the way the motifs appear to glow at their edges and in their proximity to the viewer— is a way to combat the difficulties I have with attention deficit disorder. Dark humor finds its way into the work through the subtle placement of things within a painting and how they interact with the rest of the elements. Holistically, the paintings lean toward an ominous or mysterious state, where there is not enough visual information provided to determine where these characters or objects are placed.