Khary Darby

I have always been consumed by images and consider myself an image maker first and a painter second. Yet both paradigms are important for what I am attempting to do. My work as an image maker has its genesis in a continuing obsession with images of the past and the expressive potential of a particular tradition. This interest is an intensely personal one, and it centers on European paintings of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The root of my concern hinges not on a revisionist's interest in the subtexts that these images may present us with but on the potential of such images to enthral and overwhelm.

And yet one recognizes what is lacking in such images for an individual at the end of the twentieth century. With cultural "modernity" and "progress" in shambles, we are left to scavenge a wasteland of cultural and intellectual refuse. There is a sense of perpetual winding down, since theology, philosophy, and technology seem unable to fulfill the needs of the human psyche. So one wants on some level to pull back the "screens" we live through—the empty gestures and tired conventions—in an attempt to engage in something more "real." Paradoxically, this is precisely what the modernists of the early twentieth century were attempting to do by rejecting the past.

I feel increasingly dissatisfied with the ephemeral nature of so much of contemporary art. Thus, I look for ways to create what does not exist, I yearn for "beauty" and "craftsmanship" and other such passé notions. But above all I want to crystallize a particular sensation in the alchemy of the images, to encapsulate a moment of heightened experience. I don't know if what I am doing necessarily reaches these goals, but occasionally I might, at least, create an interesting painting.

"Untitled (The distance between us)"
54 x 56 inches
Oil on canvas
2001

"Untitled (The Dragonfly)"
32 x 34 inches
Mixed media on paper on canvas
2001

"The Birth of Tragedy (Large composition in grey)"
Diptych, each panel: 56 x 54 inches
Oil on canvas
2002

"Untitled (I am, we are . . .)"
45 x 48 inches
Oil on Linen
2002