Artist Profile: Justin Waldstein

My work consists of paintings and drawings on paper, canvas, wood and steel, and live digital projections. I am interested in evocative images that embody a sense of longing, exuberant experience, organic fragmentation and fragility. I convey the opposing relationships of aspiration and defeat, triumph and mortality, glory and futility, and sensuality and decay.

Observing life directly and utilizing found photos, I focus on the distinctive characteristics of each medium with which I work and I often explore tensions between mechanical and human aspects within technique. My paintings on steel, rendered with oil and spray paint, are objects both delicate and robust, at once mechanical and transparent, like printing plates or austere icons. Paintings on unstretched canvas display wrinkled images on a sculptural, organic surface like tattooed flesh. My drawings utilize loose, fluid strokes of gouache, watercolor, ink and crayon, reveling in the striking nature of line and color. Images of the natural world reveal underlying aggression. My still and animated projections created for live, collaborative performance elevate the immediacy of a simple gesture into a digitally ephemeral, dramatic experience.

www.justinwaldstein.com

UNTITLED
Charcoal, oil and spray paint on steel.
18″ x 24″
2012