David Thomas Potter

My artistic interests include the following broad categories: Figurative, cityscape, landscape, home environments, constructions, series, multi-panel, VR/hologram, painting, drawing, photography, video, 2D digital, and writing. Such broad categories can be further broken down into sources of inspiration and explorations of world events.

I explore an eclectic variety of subject matter, styles, materials, and mediums within which I explore overarching themes. Digital video, digital photography allow me to overcome to clunkiness and slow process of film-based mediums, which I find cumbersome , and mixed reality/hologram platforms such as Openbrush remove engineering concerns of gravity or traditional sculptural materials which I find intimidating, and make the process from start to finish, fluid, like painting open to spontaneity and transformation through process.

Art that is produced in a series unifies the broad range of interests in painting/drawing, photography, video, mixed reality/holograms, and writing I have engaged in for decades, explorations of variations on a theme, a quiet meditation made impulsively, improvising on initial intent towards unpredictable ends. In retrospect, art in series seems aforethought, a foregone conclusion. Yet here it has only recently popped out glaringly from a jumble of many unrelated executions, an overarching unifying factor that strangely gives me peace of mind from a process strife with conflicts and physicality with an illusion of something intended or deliberate.

Art, as I practice it, lives in the space between observation from life and abstraction fueled by physicality and materials, with inspiration then stemming from other artists and elements of art history, among the environments I live in, and people I meet, engaging in both traditional materials and digital medium. Above all I create artwork that is at once about the world in which I traverse and an inner journey of emotional turmoil, meditation, and self-awareness as it unfolds through the life cycle. They are process documents.

There can be implicit violence in the act of destroying a canvas and reassembling it back into a construction of multiple canvases. The work is often figurative, with gestalt shifts creating a visual narrative that reveals itself in quiet moments of looking. The immediacy of untethered spontaneity is crucial for the much-needed novel surprise to my eyes. The constant dialogue of creation and destruction expresses my desires beyond the manifest content: Of joy. Love. Pleasure. Beauty. Often measured with treachery, danger, death, and mental health crises.