Studio Journal: David Humphrey

Here is a video of David Humphrey entitled Pieces of Rome. He discusses his time in Rome and how it inspired his recent works.

Here are some inspirational quotes from his book entitled Blind Handshake.

“Artists are like gods over their fabricated worlds. They continue the child’s activity of playing with blocks, toy figures, or dollhouses by other means. Control is comically exercised and helplessness is symbolically managed. They remind us that play can exercise the best part of our otherwise hardworking lives” (80).

“Artworks are crowded with solitudes. The lack of contact between artist and viewer must be part of the artwork’s enduring and distinct appeal. The paradox of detached connection might have fetish-like powers that could help explain the persistence of such an inefficient form of pleasure. Pictures engage us partly because we are able to occupy their spaces with our thoughts. Artist and viewer are, in a sense, having solitary conversations enabled by the forever off-frame other. Artworks, like novels, encourage us to travel and identify with invented others” (94).

“I think that to consider beauty as the history of its descriptions is to infuse it with a dynamic plastic life; it is to understand beauty as something that is reinvented over and over, that needs to be invented within each person and group” (228).

“I’m tempted to go against the artist in me that argues against words and throw a definition into the black hole of beauty definitions; that beauty is psychedelic, a derangement of recognition, a flash of insight or pulse of laughter out of a tangle of sensation; analogic or magical thinking embedded in the ranging iconography of desire. But any definition of beauty risks killing the thing it loves” (229).

Here is his website of work.