Métier de Rêve-Solo Show at KP Project Gallery Los Angeles CA

I believe that art is always about taking inspiration and influence from the outside and projecting it back. I can’t imagine how you could create out of a black empty vacuum of nothing. Nature, history, culture and everything outside of you creates more art and invention. What makes humanity different from other creatures on this planet is the chain of knowledge embodied in innovative things that document and pass on that knowledge so that the next link can be forged and added.

My biggest source of inspiration has always been my travels, which show me different places and cultures. A break from creating—some would call it vacation—is what recharges the urge to create again. Therefore I always think that being alive is all part of the business of being an artist. The materials we use can arrive in the most unexpected ways, from running to the supermarket to visiting Versailles. It’s all part of the “job.” So once I found myself looking for inspiration during these new times, I had to try to travel in mind and spirit rather than in the physical world with its human interactions.

Métier de Rêve, or Dream Practice, is about creating from experiences that solely existed to me as an image, a jpeg, which projected a fantasy of the mind and was rebirthed as a new form, my own art, making the dream into a physical object I could touch with every brushstroke. The language of the paint itself is the translator of those dreams.

-Kukula