Caleb McIntosh
I am struggling with tenses; this is a synopsis of what I want to say in my bio. I would like to pay homage to my parents as their upbringing influenced me tremendously, but I am struggling with tense.
This rollercoaster life of mine began with me being born in New Orleans, La to Keerthi and Alex McIntosh in 1996. My parents' influence created inspiration that I pulled from to create drawings, paintings, prints, and three dimensional mixed media pieces. The many environments I lived in or visited, such as New Orleans. India, Mississippi, and New York, affected my work through their culture. I moved to New York at the age of twenty-one to begin school at the Art Student’s League of New York, where I learned under the guidance of Deborah Winiarski, Margarett McCann, Richard Pantel, and Peter Golfinoplous. This was a wonderful experience that shaped my voice as an artist into surrealistic, cubist, and impressionist style.
​My work represents the makings of me, from who I am today to who I was yesterday to who I am to become. I grabbed techniques from artists such as Wlillem de Knooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Salvador Dali, MC Escher, Vincent Van Gogh, and Willie Birch to enrich my work. Each piece of mine explores both psychedelic and surreal environments while containing hints of realistic imagery to tailor and expand their meaning. I create art in hopes of paying homage to the people and cultures that inspire me. My purpose as an artist is to develop art for art’s sake. Like my influences, I remove the political climate from my work focusing on inner looking questions such as: Why do I exist? What constitutes what is beautiful? What is the furthest you can take a canvas? Is there such a thing as being too busy with a canvas? How do I express the inner makings of my mind? What is the purpose of existing? These questions among others reflect why I love art; to me, art is an escape from reality when reality is too much to understand.
Description About why I make art
In creative endeavors, I hope to carve a landscape for the mind where I build three distinctive universes that can be combined at times or exist in their own galaxies: the Kaleidoscope of rooms; Patterned Landscapes; and My Heroic Influences.
The first world is built from a kaleidoscope of rooms which I call rooms inside of rooms. This world is where I experiment with the possibility of the depth of perception. I formulated this world in the Art Student’s League in Richard Pantell’s class. While wondering how to place two opposing feelings on the surface, I was struck by the concept of making a painting in my etching. This caused me to become embarked on a study of rooms inside rooms. Similar to MC Escher’s surrealistic patterns, I see these spaces' potential to create patterns. These patterns lead to places to organize other patterns and so on. This is the largest of the three worlds and is my signature, I include this in most works.
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The second world Patterned Landscape only features six finalized works at the moment, but holds some of my favorite pieces. These pieces hold more sentimental value, as they are places I draw in person and paint on later. However this world exists in my notebooks more than on canvas or prints. This immediate expression pays homage to the European art that stole my heart at the age of eight when I got the privilege to visit the Louvre. These works showcase stylized influences like Grant Wood and David Hockney and take the viewer into my life at quintessential moments of the past.
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The final world is My Heroic Influences. This is where I pay homage to those that came before me, those that exist now, and those that are close to me. Often done in a more realistic setting I portray people that mean a lot to me on a canvas or in a drawing. These are personal like the other worlds, but have existed since the early years of my art and continue to this day. In this world I hope to immortalize people that have changed me over the years. This comes from the tradition that Jean Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol created, making works devoted to pop culture and political icons that shaped America.
Like comic book universes, I use the styles of these worlds to describe the inner workings of myself. I feel these styles help me answer the aforementioned questions of: Who I am? Why do I exist? What is my purpose?