Marcus Leslie Singleton
About:
Currently, my work is a reflection on reality. The thinking behind the work is to make something that has occurred at a certain point, specifically this strange clouded time we’re all experiencing, atemporal. I don’t wish to make the memories, however painful, joyful, or however graphic outlast time, my aim is to be truthful and as transparent through my art as I can, so that in effect the thought inscribed in the work outlasts the constraints of time, and maybe that gets us somewhere.
The paintings represent aesthetic beliefs, values of human nature and beauty. Expressing the idea that art is a step towards the unknown from the known, and this world of imagination is being built upon the reality that the artist is absorbing through their senses. Like a sponge when you squeeze out whatever has been soaked up, it’s the stuff that needs to come out. To me that’s the correlation between life and painting, the painting is what you squeeze out of whatever it is you’re experiencing in life.
So right now my method is reactionary. Parrying the blows from big karma, or the universe, or God. And asking questions through painting about the very time we’re in, in the form of people and what they do, and why they are doing it. I might have been able to reconcile myself to answer, if I had been able to believe that there was any solace to be found in the haven of this black body I represent, in this country. Until then I feel compelled to paint in this way in which I might come to a conclusion or closer to an answer myself. My aim is to widen the peripheral of what this time means to us and our spirits, when people look at these paintings it might help them come to some closer point to who they are and what they believe in.