STATEMENT FROM SAUL BERNSTEIN ON HIS WORK

As a child I was surrounded by works of art and had a burning desire to learn. After enrolling in art school at age 8, my teachers urged me to study the works of the Great Masters: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt.

I spent every spare moment feverishly tracing their works, honing my ability to draw as I laboriously traced every nuance and line! The older students in class intimidated me until I overheard a comment, "Man, can that Bernstein draw." If only they knew how the Masters were forcing me to look, see and learn. Today I am still driven to research and discover more. When an artist produces a work, he or she only has two options. The first option is decoration. The life expectancy of that theory lasts only as long as the life of the couch! As soon as the style of furniture changes, the artwork is discarded. The artist's second option is to represent the time in which the work was created. When that piece of art is found in the future, viewers will get a clue to the thinking of it's time. All masterpieces fall into the later category. As an artist in the 21st Century, I choose to portray the "sign of the times." The most important part of my personal artistic process involves asking questions. I am perpetually thinking "what if?"

When I create a work, it is as much an intellectual pursuit as a creative one. Every stroke I make is done with a purpose. What else is painting or drawing but a desire to communicate? The theme of my current work is based on science and technology.

The past gave us the tools of painting, but for me, that isn't enough. It is the marriage of the past and the present - what we were then versus who and what we are now - that drives me. My passion is to address the developments of civilization lest my work ends up in the trash heap of decoration.

Saul Bernstein
2010