Moon Mist 🖤 by Jared Betts

Artist Statement

Betts is heavily influenced by abstract expressionism, flower gardens, fairies, anime, and colours from the 80s. He admits to being drawn to Madonna’s leopard pattern fashion era and cyberpunk future retro aesthetic. His approach incorporates gestures and organic forms, working in layers while exploring tensions between recognizable forms and abstraction.

“My use of ethereal gesture and expressionist forms has since set the tone for my highly charged prismatic colour field paintings. I aim to rethink the very parameters of contemporary painting, and my work touches on many pertinent and pressing concerns around the practice of chromatic mark making, and how these relate to artistic ideals in the 21st century. My martyristic paintings inhabit the space where consciousness descends into dream, where pattern and colour expand to become an immersive sensory experience. In this celestial space, I seek to examine this dream-like suppression of recognizable imagery and capture the visceral sensations with the sublime nature of drips and the colour field. Multiple layers of tension – between the duality of conscious and subconscious surrealist automatism, flat surface, and illusory depth – propel my Aquarian desire to use visual cues as a means of stimulating ascending metaphysical sensation."

- Jared Betts, 2023