Artist Statement

The wide-angled compositions originated, for me, in the early 1990s as a sardonic attempt to capture the then trend of cropped, panoramic photography and film developing. The panoramic format stuck as I continued in my interest for urbanscape paintings, in which it eventually and suitably evoked the subject of population sprawl and mass-communities that I was after.

My work is about the industrial mundane, the urbanized deserts and the metropolis serenity. It is very interesting, to me, to witness the ironies of deafening mobilization and sentimental stillness interlaced within highly developed and overcrowded cities. My ideas examine the notions of alienation vs. congregation that occurs at a particular point in time, in very specific locations. It is not urban development itself that I am inevitably drawn to, but rather to the paradoxes of every social encounter and human isolation in the midst of urban development. It is about transportation. It is about transactions. It is about stoic epiphanies. These vast negative spaces and almost monolithic icons evoke much deducing within my memory, becoming abstractions and reminiscences that are so intriguing!

My greatest influence comes from Willem de Kooning, Chuck Close and Antonio Tapies.

Donald Yatomi
2009