George Graf is not your every day artist. Every day he sees art in found objects discarded by man’s thirst to consume. His frustration with waste and his love of nature compel him to speak for the land through his art. He started out as a potter and also did drawings. He found that these two mediums were not meeting his creative needs so he started making unique frames for his drawings. He gradually began to use “found objects” as art. He would fish out all types of materials from dumpsters, on curbs and on back roads. “Everything we produce should have a purpose.” George’s present works critique Postmodern culture by exposing the contrast between the natural world and the synthetic one created by humans. “Our obsession with the pursuit of material things has stunted our spiritual and intellectual development. We are trading our humanity for stuff!” He feels that the developers and entrepreneurs who exploit the land have little regard for the impact of their actions. “No one speaks for the land.” George expands on this theme of nature versus technology in his present work using the objects that he collected while on a recent trip to Ireland. “These items really jumped out at me - they said take me!” I am making an attempt to show Ireland as I saw it, a wonderful ancient land but also new and youthful. He takes these objects, that range from ancient rocks to modern plastics, and transforms them into wall art that shows, through his timeline, this ancient country gone modern. |
