Sean Landers (b. 1962)

"During the years of 2003 to 2008, Landers looked back to his formative body of work-text paintings produced between 1991 and 1994, in which he began to use writing as a visual media. The diaristic and confessional writing gives voice to the inside of the artist's head, yet the intensely personal is obscured by the elision of fact and fiction. In Bad Idea Bad Boy, Landers takes the graphic nature of those early works and explodes it into spatial abstract painting. As Landers wrote in a review of one of his exhibitions during these years 'We've entered his skull conceptually and visually. Words and phrases ricochet off the walls of his cranium and we are among the brushstrokes.' The words on the painting embody emerging thoughts, coming to the fore, which are in turn, superseded by new ones coming in at an almost-frenzied pace. 'I was trying to give thought a picture,' Landers has said about these types of paintings."