Joe Flaherty

I make paintings that aim at being curious and peculiar before they aim at being highly representational, affirmative or handsome.  I try to paint in a way that exhibits the quality of the materials, especially the paint which I apply with unusual and sometimes crude tools.

 

I would hope that my paintings, when viewed from a room length distance, gladden the eye with bold colors, and intricate and interesting lines and shapes that invite the viewer to look closer.  

 

If one of my paintings succeeds in inviting closer inspection, I would like viewers to get close enough so that their peripheral vision is absorbed, to stick their noses right up to a painting to find patterns of opposites in color, texture, depth and composition. I would hope these explorations somehow stimulate the mind, not in a “Where’s Waldo” sense of looking for something one knows to be there, but in a heuristic discovery, an “aha” moment.

 

Finally, my hope is that viewers’ contemplation of observed patterns, relationships, concealments and revelations in some way lift the spirit by conveying different ways of looking at the world with its many obvious and sometimes glaring images, as well as its obstructing, suppressing, camouflaging, barricading and sometimes concealing layers.