Painting is an outlet in which I can easily become mesmerized loosing a sense of time as I focus on what’s in front of me. I am particularly fascinated by older machinery with its intricate design elements and quarks, carefully crafted with materials that are incomparable to the machinery of today. I appreciate how these lifeless objects have such sculptural, organic forms. Their bright lively colors are intriguing as they reflect the energy and power they use/produce.

The machine is also a representation of today’s modern society where it appears in the working world you are only as good as the amount of work you are able to generate. It doesn’t matter how you go about things, what steps are skipped along the way; just so long as the job gets done as fast and cheap as possible. With modern technology we become less human, with fewer face-to-face social interactions, and develop into isolated beings through email, and websites, as well as instant and text messaging.

We say we know these people, yet have no recollection of what they look like, with exception to perhaps a photo-shopped tagged image. More accurately, we know them only through typed or phone conversations. We are losing a sense of visual identity of one another within society. Correspondingly, the older machinery i depict has lost its distinguishing features which once reflected pride in design and technology to today’s machines that reflect the cheap, monotonous, easily mass producible society which is taking the forefront.


-April Odell