Cracking Up

Artist Statement by Tom Everhart

April, 2006 

It occurred to me recently, while laughing hysterically at my own reflection dancing uncontrollably around me on the four feet of colorful transparent Tahitian water, that the act of cracking up can be extremely visual. Depending on your own interest, the way you see things in the world, it can be extremely comical or emotionally uncontrolled and helpless.

This body of work, all under the title of. “Cracking Up”, is a topographical autobiography of my last six years, starting with the beginning of the 21st century. In terms of subject matter, all of the work consist of self-portraits and, or portraits of others conveying my way of seeing them in the act of cracking up. I believe that cracking up has never excluded anyone, at least in some small way, so I have tried to invest a certain universality of feeling and meaning encouraging the viewer to become the portrait.

Surrounding the majority of the portraits are groups of various marks that formulate a map of the mind. Each section of marks refers to a possible place, time, or activity in the form of a visual memory that may have been the road traveled to the crack up.

Finally, much of my past six years have been spent in French Polynesia. Because of the light, you see more color, and thus, there is, more color in life there that influences the warmth of the mind maps that frame the figures Cracking up.