Note to...Self

Acrylic, Oil paint, Charcoal, Ink

40 x 26 inches

For the past ten years Vernon Salyers’s art has been based on the idea of an “abstract '' autobiographical---a nonlinear journal of sorts. This body of work manifested ten years ago out of necessity for various reasons due to a near death accident. Recovering from a fully paralyzed state to a partial and thus, confronting new and very different realities as an artist and teacher. He turned his focus away from social-political observations, and started this new journey of the “self” series.

This current series Note to Self; … pulls from pages of a notepad that I’ve meticulously kept and coded for medical and personal reasons for the past ten years. As well as journals, and scrap paper he scribbled on, doodling in the dark on anything available, mostly strained beyond recondition, such as signatures and scrawls that came from taping a pen to his left hand, being the right hand/arm was useless.

Note to Self; #... Series, relies on embellishing subtle textures that conjure (a summoning effect) to reveal obscure images. These amorphous forms buried in the textures have surfaced in the process for further inquiry. He abandons some formal routines and compositional ideas. Creating past scenarios, such as taping objects to his left hand again and scribbling in the dark on the actual work. Letting happen chance and process aid and allude to ambivalence, chaos and confusion, and yet still trying to find some unorthodox order in the obscure vernacular. The work almost always starts with a collage process from a notepad. A base in which everything manifests. When the layers collide images and characters appear. Finding beauty in the grieving numbers.

The intention is to make these images as honest or pure as they appeared to him in their nebulous form. Not to be contrived or absolute in the manipulation, as tempting as that is. Just enough to entice intrigue, by capturing oddity and evoking the emotional and psychological.