Today we’d like to introduce you to Aristotle Forrester.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I was born to an amazing single mother who raised me in the South Side of Chicago. Being raised without a father was an aspect of my reality, as it was with many other of my friends. My mother pushed me to explore creativity to not only to manage my time, but to also help me explore my emotional landscape. Though we did not have much, my mother saved up money periodically and took me to the Art Museum of Chicago. From my perspective as a young Chicago south-sider, art was transcendental. My first art viewing experiences as a 10 year-old could be equated to being at an 80s night club, or in the front row at the Vatican’s high mass, it was reverent. I had never felt more alive. While gazing into the depths of Van Gogh’s landscape. I felt the permission to explore, and I made it a point to study painting from then on. I wanted to understand how to wield the. Magic of pigment.
When I grew up I went to Massachusetts College of Art and Design. While In my Senior Year I was signed on to Matter and Light Fine Art. With gallery representation, I graduated with departmental honors in the spring of 2016. Upon graduation I won to an International Museum Residency in Beijing China, hosted by the Inside-Out Art Museum. While at the residency I studied ancient Chinese scrolls and modern paintings from the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Now I am trying to explore my own Cultural Revolution as an artist. I am a Black man making contemporary abstraction that falls in likeness to the works of Dekooning, Kandinsky, Matta. I celebrate that I can participate in the art movements of the great artists of history. As I grow I see that as a kid from the South Side of Chicago, art has given me a seat in a bigger world then I could ever imagine.
Please tell us about your art.
In concept I create pictorial environments that allows one to transcend the concept of scale and perspective. In my recreation of deconstructed reality, I aim to capture the macro and microcosms of infinitesimal space through the potent and penetrating power of color and line. I am an Existential Abstractionist.
Abstraction takes the viewer past the veneer of representation into the origins of energy itself. It draws on the sacred energy current that all things stem from. It allows for the manifestation of things unknown and unmeasurable. It is a universal language that operates past the binary confines of verbal communication. Abstraction connects the primal powers of unrefined color and form. It manifests forms and atmosphere from a raw perceptual past. Abstraction reconnects us with the spiritual world from whence we once came.
Only through the purity of abstraction can the mind truly unfurl, and in that moment of sublimation, our soul becomes buoyant. Through abstraction, we momentarily escape the pressure of our reality and receded to our primal past. We come from passionate marks made with the intention of quantifying the unknown. Abstraction has always been our primary tool for crafting what we call reality. A single mark on a cave wall could show a human their relation to the world around them. We spoke first through pigment and line, we taught and expressed through this form of abstraction as well. The factuality of my abstractions solely relies on the specific and intentional marks I make. Through them, I am able to breathe life into atmospheric and immense abstract landscapes.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing artists today?
The biggest challenge facing artists today is keeping people present, with tech culminating everything. The time for Art is now, we as humans need creativity in a time when we have been trained to be consumers of mass-produced creative products. There is an over-saturation in the art market with preference given to blue chip bidders and deceased artists, although this largely is a perspective problem. When the majority of art that people see is in a museum or priceless. There is little public understanding of the value of art (outside of it being a massive investment). I fear that the ability for people to collect at a beginning level is in danger of destruction. The art world has been contorting to fit some embellished likeness to the renaissance, but in turn is squeezing out the mirth and content of the less monolithic artists practicing in our contemporary time. These are just a couple of the issues every artist faces, staring in the open sea of the art world. I am thankful for my place in the circus.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
People can see my work at
– Instagram: @aristotlesabstractions
– Website: Ariforrester.com
– Matter and Light Fine Art, 63 Thayer St. Boston
– Saatchiart.com; search Aristotle Forrester
– Contact me at Aforrestermail@gmail.com for a personal viewing.
The best support for people to provide is to spend time with the paintings, spread the word about my art and honestly to buy my art. Art is my full time job.
