Artist Statement

Creating my art is not only about expressing how I feel about the world but also how I feel in the world, in my environment, in my time.

My body of work deals with the human figure and puts it in relationship with the daily news of a globalized world, utilizing newspapers of various languages that reference my cultural and racial background and the places that I live in and travel to.

By literally making the drawings part of the page, the three-dimensional figures of charcoal and pigment start a dialogue with the mostly two-dimensional space of news items on the page. A dialogue that is both graphical and psychological as my personal and at times intimate experience of drawing the figures becomes part of the news: my news.

Furthermore, the date on every newspaper page places my creative interaction with the depicted person in time and etches it into my personal history.

The technical rawness I like to keep in these pieces are a direct translation of my psychological experience in a day-in-day-out society.

I have always been fascinated with the preparation sketches of Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. I find the unfinished rawness of them more appealing and more honest: they strike me as an undisguised ‘skeleton’ of the finished works.

That the figures that I depict would have to be stripped of all their external barriers and that newspapers -- a daily record and ‘backbone’ of our social and cultural awareness—should be my canvas seemed only logical.

These are, if you will,
my " Daily New(d)s".

Winston Torr (August 2007)