Navel Lint Drawings

I’ve always felt that abstraction has its place in art, just not in mine. Trying to overcome that gap of understanding on my part took a joke, albeit a long one for me. I was once reviewed in a local newspaper in upstate New York and was told that my work was “navel gazing”. This kind of hurt my feelings a bit as some of the other works in the show I was participating in felt similar and I decided that perhaps I should double down my efforts in search of a way to make my “navel gazing” over the top or more interesting to the viewer. I wanted to make something that might really stand away from the ideas being put forth all in the vein of “navel gazing” abstractions. I also realized around this time that my body produces an enormous amount of lint that collects in my belly button. So I began saving it.

The works I created from this process become a primitive viewpoint on art and stand as a critique on the idea of abstraction. They are “navel gazing” in the most literal sense of the word, stealing the phrase’s abstract notions from itself and using its abstractions to my own ends.