Joseph Fitzpatrick

Louisville, Kentucky

In a Garden; watercolor sketch; 11 x 14; 2003

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Painting, before you put in apples, sunny pastures, moonscapes, is - like all the arts - about illusion. Subject matter in a work counts for something, affecting painter and viewer alike, but painting is about creating the illusion of space on an opaque, flat surface. Absent the illusions of light and space, a work is simply representation, lacking the vitality that light and the perception of space bring to everyday visual experience.

While all the arts engage the mystery of illusion, they are also, and fundamentally, about human feeling; in the case of painting, ideas about feeling are fused in the sensual stuff of paint itself. Art is, when it succeeds - with no intent to be sacrilegious - a kind of transubstantiation of feeling into form; secular miracles realized in paint, words, movement and sound.

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