Ethan Price
United States
B. 1991
Ethan Price currently works and resides in Lexington, Kentucky.
His work aims to describe a world occupied by haunting figures, pulled from half-remembered dreams and old photographs. Each piece implants a delicate handling of drawing materials to create a body of work that evokes mystery, decay, and the passage of time.
By mixing a subtle buildup of form through graphite, with a painterly use of solvents to scour the surface, the figurative works inherit a quality of old daguerrotypes or spoiled film. The aim is to at once create a sense of familiarity, while reminding the viewer of the materiality of the medium and the artist’s hand.
Technical draftsmanship and an academic approach to drawing are paired with an expressionistic and contemporary sensibility. The goal is to explore how figurative subject matter can be executed with academic technique and still fit in the modern art context—without being seen as archaic or overly reliant on surface level detail.
Embodied in each drawing is an inherent blend of tension and anonymity. The symbols and moments expressed are often solitary and disconsolate subjects, draped in hazy atmosphere. Enigmatic and phantasmal qualities make an explicit narrative hard to pin down, but the viewer is invited to transcribe their individual story of the spectral figures.
* This statement has been provided directly by the artist in association to their 15th International ARC Salon entries. This content has not been edited for typos or grammatical errors and has not been vetted for accuracy.
