BOB WORTHY

Most of my adult life was spent as a computer programmer. I’m now happily enjoying the alternate life, the road not taken before.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I appreciate a wide range of art, literature, and music. Living in Montana, I regularly enjoy outdoor experiences in a dynamic and sometimes challenging climate. The solitary experience and natural beauty of the landscape works its way into my artwork directly and in less obvious ways. There is something beautiful to take note of every minute.In my forty years of wandering in the techno business wilderness, I came to appreciate the beauty of simplicity. It’s an abstract aesthetic all its own. Nature, and human nature, is endlessly varying and complex. Nature drowns you with sensation. To cope, we abstract and simplify, both as solutions to problems and as artistic expression. This is my uppermost concern in making art. Some art comes to me directly from an experience outdoors – hikes along a snowy ridge, deep Ponderosa shadows, three rocks in a small stream, a lurid yellow and pink February sunset on open bench land among junipers. The abstraction renders the characters in those scenes, solid pillars of Ponderosa pine, the fast changing but oddly static froth of riffles changing in a rushing stream. Catch it somehow and let the viewer experience not just a snapshot, but the flow of the water, the changing light.

Truly abstract pieces come from drawing patterns, very simple patterns, in pencil, and following their possibilities of color and those shapes that are not quite recognizable. When the drawing becomes a painting it develops a mood, an emotional content. Line and color carefully applied enhance the intellectual value of the piece, the mode of your thought that reflects on the shapes and colors. I work on these usually over many months, erasing, enhancing, and so on to bring together a composition with obvious and not-so-obvious qualities. Some elements are meant to remain hidden, in plain sight, for the viewer to develop a greater intimacy with the painting, and perhaps to be never be resolvable with certainty.Collage works are a process of discovery. They start with a color or a texture, perhaps a bit of shiny paper. They grow slowly at first, until a number of torn and cut papers begin to fit together. Text is easy to incorporate into collage. Often it means nothing in the piece itself, but text to the literate conveys special context and emotion. Text is a familiar texture. Collage often tries to represent mental systems, modern systematic thought, and human construction. I scan and transfer these images to very permanent printed objects that have equivalent qualities with the original, fragile, paper.Abstraction always leads me back to landscape, perhaps because I want you to feel you are ‘in’ the picture, your intelligence is playing with the structure, and you and the painting are becoming better and better acquainted, until you are good friends.