I look for images that are metaphors for our life experiences: love, desire, and making art. These paintings and drawings contain narrative content and ask questions about social issues and the swirl of images we are surrounded by.

Once, the task of the artist was to portray and interpret the ‘real world.’ Now it is to determine if there even is a reality behind the appearance of things. It appears, more and more, that reality is created by observation. This search through the ‘stuff’ of the world, matter and flesh, is inherently erotic. So is the act of painting.

The material world pulls at us and it seems we are always troubled with desire for it. It is our essence; we seek the spiritual through it. The visible world is the key, the path, to the invisible world. But it is ‘desire’ that clouds the seeking. I don’t renounce matter but immerse myself to find the spiritual behind it.

The edges of things and places interest me, the transition areas. I have been thinking about the ‘inter-connectedness’ of things, the Uncertainty Principle, the fact that there may be no 'deep reality' underneath the appearances of objects, that traces of distant stars are passing through us at this moment, that the charcoal (carbon) with which I am drawing was
once a living thing.

What is still worthwhile to paint? Language. Drawings and paintings can consist of signs forced from one context into another. Some of my drawings and paintings are a jumble of images -- meaning must be deciphered. They are a crisis of interpretation. One must be willing to "juggle" contradictions and seemingly conflicting views because of the overlapping meanings present in the work

As analogies, these drawings and paintings can communicate timeless ideas -- mixing the conceptual, the figural, and the formal as one mixes primary colors.

Peter Illig