b. 1990
Forrest is a painter from Dover, New Hampshire that currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA in Painting from Massachusetts college of Art and Design and his MFA in Studio Art from New York University.
“These paintings are trying to think about self portraits in a wider sense. What happens when the skin is pulled back? Taking the sort of bonehead language of all paintings are self portraits literally. Anxieties of fragility, insignificance, complicity, burnout, are now the portrait. Over time recursion strengthens the algorithm and the paintings become not me but a character with a background of influences. I am interested in the comic grotesque, the idea of the artist as a fool, a painter character. Using funny but vulgar associations to communicate on power structures or communal anxieties.”
Q. If you could offer your younger self any advice at the start of your artistic career, what would it be?”
A. “Oof where to start. Make the studio the priority. We all have to work, it sucks, but it should be a means in which to get to studio. Make the studio your first job. It’s easy to get burnt out and tired and let life cut into studio but if it’s your priority it helps fight against that. Realizing the job doesn’t define me its what I do in the studio that defines me helped me do that.
Look at more old art, copy them. Write more. Write down what you’re doing in studio, memories, stories in your head. Try and expand on the writing and work through it to help you figure out what you’re trying to do and say in the work. Draw more, Work more, party less.”