*Hotshot
A NEW EXHIBITION / EVENT / RETAIL SPACE IN KENSINGTON MARKET

Art as Therapy, a collection of new paintings by Thomas Shortliffe

February 27 to March 8, 2010

Reception February 27 at 6pm

Art-as-therapy extends a bridge between inner and outer experience, personal and political action. These paintings are not merely some aesthetic object for exclusive consumption. They are a statement about the importance of the discussion about art as therapy. The political motivation of my work is to revive the vestiges of experiential, sensory knowledge evident in spirituality without religion, purpose without reason and meaning without rationality. The impetus of my painting is to question the widely held assumption that the universe is a machine rather than organism. In rejection of this assumption, I paint from the “inside out”, from my truest pre-rational nature. Based in Jungian intuition and Freudian instinct, the images emerge out of formless form to claim an existence on the canvas somewhere between real and not quite real. Our obsession with control should be abandoned and our genetically inherited capacity for adaptation must be called forth to fully get the image.  Any sense that the viewer is in a place at once familiar and unknown is intentional. Any sense of spontaneity or déjà-vu is deliberate.