I am a contemporary artist who bases his work on tradition. My need to express myself comes from memories of growing up in a little rural town, which is full of the colorful stories and personalities that are only found in country places. I work with oil on canvas and drawings on Amate paper. My drawings are the black and white interpretation of my life’s journey, while my paintings acquire an apparent happiness because of their coloring.

Inspired by antiwar posters, activist posters, Occupy Wall Street protest signs, and hand-scrawled home-for-sale signs wired to street-corner telephone poles, Loveland examines the power of the individual’s voice in society. Working with mass-produced, found graphics such as pin-up girls and rock posters, the artist obliterates everything but the mouth, the vehicle of the voice, through processes of masking and erasure. The resulting expanses of open space surrounding the figures initiate a dialogue between them—singing turns to screaming, a simple smile becomes overtly erotic.

Originally a traditional painter, classically trained to work from direct observation, I became dissatisfied, believing there must be something more to say, and increasingly aware of social concerns in my City, New Orleans. I narrowed my focus to address the absence of presence in the urban environment, represented by abandoned and blighted houses. In New Orleans, this was a result of population shifts to suburbia, followed by the demolition of public housing projects, and finally the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and its subsequent flooding.

My paintings narrate my life through symbols with personal and cultural significance, as I focus on issues of identity, sexuality, and control. By naturalistically rendering simulated scenes, I layer artifice and veracity, thereby dramatizing the uncanny nature of the reality of domestic experiences.

My work employs narratives such as love, untimely death, and corruption of character while seemingly referring to idioms of a golden age in classical painting. The narratives I use refer to forgotten instinctual fears and involuntary themes of Evolutionary Psychology that have been superficially satiated by our modern reliance on rationalism. This creates a contradiction with the “classical” language in my work which harkens back to a pre-modern and pre-rational era when many of these behaviors were employed to satisfy inexplicable and uncontrollable events that threatened our preservation.

In a manner of speaking, we need not confine ourselves to the duality of innocence and guilt. In order to mitigate “reality” in both concrete and virtual terms, we must go with the flow. And this flow is comprised of a multitude of forces and frequencies that shape, pressure, and contour our experiences. Thus, by operating within the field(s) from which things emerge and recede, one may work tactically in order to hijack the grain from within the grain.

My work documents the loss of animal species and records the last vestiges of their lives. The specific animals I focus on are endemic to Canada, the country of my citizenship, the issues surrounding their erasure however are global and affect all life, regardless of national boundaries.

In my art, I aim to find what is really essential to the function or nature of the creative process or the final results of this process. I can only see art as a real, concrete space, where modification is possible only in a real and concrete manner; from this emerges the incomprehensible, the disconcerting and the imaginative. I have great interest in art based in geometrical shapes and concepts, and have always searched for an expression that is closest to the real space that surrounds us.

In my recent work I am exploring themes relating to botany, anatomy, physiology, art history, and beauty. My curiosity stems from the awareness that both human and botanical bodies possess common feature which serve similar purposes and are all at once visually stunning. I am specifically attracted to the colorful vascular system and the crisp root and branch system. Through painting I present their notable features as both unified and interchangeable.

My paintings and photographs exist in the space between the accurate and the abstract, reducing, blurring, and simplifying to reveal the essence of memory and perception. Surrounded by the lush lowlands of rural South Carolina, I am inspired by the quiet solitude of Hopper, the cinematography of Jean-Luc Goddard, the captured moments of Cartier-Bresson, the serenity of Rothko, the range of Richter, and the endless juxtapositions of Albers.