New York-based expressionist painter Luke Yocum also goes by the alias The Amish Neo, an allusion to his Pennsylvania upbringing. Yocum cites his experiences with attention deficit disorder and Tourettes' Syndrome as sources of the cacophony of figures, words and shapes that uneasily share most of his canvases. His colorful and violent artworks undoubtedly tap into and express a tidal wave of unconscious energies. Yocum's paintings are generally dominated by primal human figures portrayed with expressive lines and forms. Their expressions alternate between alienation, fear and anxiety, delirium and derangement.
Jean-Michel Basquiat's art certainly influenced Yocum's style, but so have the work of earlier modern masters like Van Gogh, Picasso and Francis Bacon. Indeed, Yocum's style may seem familiar at first, but the iconography is entirely his own. He incorporates elements from lived urban experience, politics, advertising, pop culture, art history and video games. And yet, despite their personal specificity, his paintings speak to a collective unconscious of uneasily-suppressed anxieties and fears.
|