Maui, Hawaii: The beginings of the burn board.
Artist Statement from his Fire in the Valley show:
"This session is a visual reflection on a cultural current. This session was created shortly after reading the book 'No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Living' by Heather Menzies.
The book is a very interesting description of something that I have suspected in myself for a long time. Menzies describes the social consequences of information technology merging with our life and work styles. She describes its tendency to speed up the pace of everything and to fragment everything into commodifiable units and symbols.
Increasingly our lives are sped up to the point where our ability to relate to others is likewise fragmented. The demand for ever newer, ever faster, ever fresher products and information distracts us from the things that are really important in life. We become "anaesthetized" to the real world.
Menzies describes a typical morning in her life:
"...Tea mug in one hand, mouse in the other, I click to make my connection to the internet. While the modem dials into the server, I make a phone call, but the line is tied up.... If sift through my e-mail, write a check for a bill I haven't yet transferred to a pre-authorized payment plan, and by the time I lean back and grab my mug the tea's gone-- all gone-- and I can't remember having drunk it. It's as though it never happened, or I wasn't here enough to experience it. I'm connected all right, yet strangely disconnected at the same time."
"...Somewhere between the multi-tasking pace and the sea of data divorced from real life, we're losing touch with ourselves and with each other."
Being an avid computer user myself, the book struck a chord. It's easy to spend hours working and communicating on the computer. Yet it certainly isn't quality relationship time. A tendency ingrained from computing to multi task everything is likewise a significent impediment to relating to others and being fully there with them.
The images from this session are composed of discarded computer parts, random words, and other broken elements of the modern world. The pieces were composed in an intuitional flow. I think they point to a deep personal interpretation of the theme of technological burnout. "
Using the Images
Keeping with the artist's fire painting philosophy these pictures are free for you to use for your own or for commercial projects. Please see terms of use for more details.
FIRENews Signup
Be on the edge of art! Get the artist's FIRENews art Newsletter once a month. Receive new art, read about featured artists, and possibly win a free print!
Special Sales
Check out the special sales page for print, poster and painting sales.
>> Specials...
Guest book
Share your thoughts on the art and read what other visitors are saying.
>> Guest book...
Cell Phone backgrounds
Set a Fire Painting as the background of your cell phone!
>> Free Backgrounds...
