artist statement - Tai Lipan
There are paintings that can be understood, and there are paintings that surpass formal questions by becoming a new reality. I want to make paintings that you feel more than analyze.  Philip Guston expressed that a Rembrandt portrait is no longer a stand- in for a person, but it is a new entity and life.  My subject choice is unassuming, but there is content to be found and reborn in the mundane.
 
Through still life motifs I am using observation as a means of gathering information.  The still-life provides rhythms, movements, and forces that reestablish the objects from their literal identities.  My goal in redefining these objects is to develop a dense relationship, forming a new existence. 
 
I am interested in a similar density of mass in Egyptian paintings depicting offerings.  In these painting, mounds of food are being offered to their gods.  While the different fruits and fowl can be identified, the offering is first read as one large object.  It has transformed into a whole offering while maintaining the integrity of its parts.  Philip Guston’s figurative work also has dense, heavy forms that create their own logic and order as paintings. Creating this new logic is what motivates my work.