Joseph Derse,
Painter

I create art as an expression of my inner thoughts of visualization and the love of accentuating the trust established in education, healthcare, and environmentalism. I come from a family of artists which instituted the importance of creativity to me as a young child. I grew up near the Big South Fork National Park which also created an understanding and craving for beauty. Later, in college I helped teach the usage of sculptor tools which helped my conceptual looking at three dimensional arts and gave me the idea to incorporate similar elements into my paintings.
Since college my art has slowly taken on this third dimension. I have since had art shows in Portland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Louisville, Lexington, Berea, Rock Island, and Davenport. My art has also been on the news, where I was protesting police brutality in one case. I have also shown some of my sculptures on a TV commercial, and on Sports Center, and was lucky to have some of my work caught on WBKO News.
I started creating artwork when I was four. Now I live in Portland, Oregon and have begun making oil paintings again and doing a little sculpture. My many vivid dreams have led me to incorporate surreal qualities in my artwork.
A mathematical order, also takes form in my artwork as: zigzags, continuous lines, straight lines, moon shapes, and triangles; I focus on adding chromatic colors and texture when I deem it as advantageous to this complexity, I am looking for. Following my intuition in the technique of making marks, I smear goop, brush, and splash paint to achieve processes. In doing this, realistic subjects are assembled in unusual relationships with each other. These alternating realities often overlap and remain unexplained. My Personal sense of beauty in the painting process leads me to try and incorporate intense light and sun imagery. Repeated design motifs and similar colors distributed across each canvas - unify and focus the compositions.
My creative process comes through mixing and incorporating the ideas and techniques used by van Gogh, and Seurat into my own art making. I usually base my art on nature, although this is not always the case. Asking visual questions pulls more viewers into my artist experience.
The intentional complexity of subject, content, and painting design invites inquiry on the part of the viewer. Through the innocence of my painted trees, I hope to instill that visions can speak more quickly than words and generally do. Trees don’t bend or break when people get upset and serve as good examples, although the world finds little time to understand and enjoy these masters of peace, harmony, and silence. We are more like trees with their roots, or onions than telecommunication lines, factions, or walls would make us think. In a world where signals come and go in straight lines, it becomes hard to conceptualize that which came first, and in the end: remains curvy.