Hi, Iโm Dato.
Iโm an artist and poet exploring the concept of home and the spaces we inhabit by investigating how these relate to our inner world, our memories, and imagination. For the past few years Iโve been working with collage and digital painting to create figurative representations that draw from personal experiences, literary references, and esoteric symbolism.
With the advent of AI Iโve recently taken my work back into physical media. This isnโt the first time new image-making technology has changed how artists have expressed themselves through painting. But, I felt that now was the best time, at least for me, to sate a certain longing for a more expressive way to create, something that leaves behind evidence of my process and my way of seeing within the medium itself. Painting with physical media has given me a chance to show the emergent aspects of my work in a way that I could connect with tangible material. Especially in the current landscape where images are so quick and easy to produce, I felt that the physicality of paint adds a dimensional weight to what I need to express.
As artists, weโre constantly told and shown a million reasons why and how our work can be valuable, but I would argue that this is exactly why we need to ask ourselves why we're creating in the first place. With all the noise and the tendency to form echo chambers of what weโre supposed to be, and how weโre supposed to do things, itโs easy to forget that we have the freedom to choose how we approach our practice.
I'm currently choosing to create slowly. I'm choosing not to fomo into the success of others by following in their footsteps. I'm choosing to go through the struggle and the time-consuming conversation between me and the canvas. I want to labor over each work and feel the pull of oil and pigment on my brush and palette knife. I want to leave marks of myself within the peaks and ridges of my paintings. I have only a finite amount of time to make art, and I want every stroke to be a record that I was once here.