![]() Explain what “surrational’ is and how you employ the concept in your art. They come from a place in my head where nothing bad ever happens.Ĥ. They insinuate themselves into my sketches. They are cute little things trying to have fun, be happy and find enlightenment just like the rest of us but smooth and shiny like living gummy brand products. Where do the wide-eyed, snaggle-toothed casts of characters come from? The faces and animals in your work seem both diverse and highly stylized. South Western Arizona is the strangest and most beautiful experience you can get without traveling space or ingesting a weird hippy chemical.ģ. In two weeks I can usually shoot at least four to five thousand photos. I mail myself home boxes of cacti, beautiful stones and any toy totem pole I can get my hands on. When I need to recharge nothing does it better than a couple of weeks hiking and driving in Arizona. I get a lot of pleasure from my collection postcards of bridges, freeze frame photographs of splashing water, time lapse films, antique squeaky toys, and cereal boxes as well. Captain Beefheart, The Residents, Can, John Coltrane, Soft Machine and Henry Cow all excel at that. I like long, eventful, dense but meditative pieces. I play music in continuity while I’m awake. A smile on a flower shows a happy flower, a smiling man carries with him the history and behavior of his species, which is a lot of extra baggage I don’t care to lug around in my art. I have always chosen animals and personified objects to express the emotion and intelligence in my work whenever possible. It reinforces my assessment of this behavior that repulses me so. To Quote George Petros from his introduction to my article in Seconds Magazine “it sometimes seems a shame that his innocent abandon is wasted on sour, seen-it-all adult audience.” To the contrary, I’ve taken a strange pleasure in adults finding the dark irony and violence they crave so strongly in my work when it wasn’t drawn there. I believe that our adult society is pleased with its irony, sardonic wit and grim prophecy which it presents as intellectual property while continuously overlooking “childish” joy and pleasures: the sensations that each child and adult crave in perpetuity. I wanted to engage with this activity, while providing it to a larger demographic. In 1998 Juxtapoz magazine described my efforts as an artist as techniques to “synthesize joy.” I have in fact always been fascinated at how images depicting joy and happiness are located almost entirely on products aimed at child consumers. Increasingly since I began drawing seriously in my teens, the ideas I was dealing with revolved around glee and a preternatural harmony expressed in my art to this day. Your drawings and illustrations have an intrinsically childlike sense of play. The more traveling I do, the more talking I do, the more drawings I do, the more ground I walk over the happier I am. I’m interested in the freedom it finds for itself, its synchronicities, magical coincidences and strange overlapping of events. ![]() What interests me about life and art isn’t systems or exacting communication, that’s someone else’s job. It confuses me in the same way it confuses the viewer when I do it correctly. I’m not concerned with communicating a specific thought or personal insight I try to convey energy. You can only become enlightened by your own phenomena. “ STEVEN CERIO” interviewed by Jen for THE POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNALġ What meaning do you hope people find in your work? ![]()
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