Pahl Hluchan was born in Riverside, California; USA. He recently received his Master's degree from the Yale School of Art in Connecticut after working in the video production field for several years. He has taught at Southern Connecticut University and the Creative Art Workshop in New Haven. He has shown widely in Connecticut and New York.

"In my work I explore the irrational. I mix the mundane with fantastic, the exterior world of middle America and the interior world of intense emotion. Recently I have been experimenting by lacing abstracted figures into representational setting. When these abstract figures are transplanted they become mythological beings, monsters and fantastic creatures.

 

I get my inspiration from many different sources. Recently I have been interested in abstract and abstract surrealist art as well as children's toys and cartoons. Although the former group is considered high art and the latter popular culture, they share similarities. Both use abstracted forms to create an emotional reaction. Picasso contorted the human form in Guernica to express human suffering. A bear cub's features are exaggerated to create an extra cute teddy bear. In my work I mix these and other references. A single figure might be a combination of microscopic organism, machine, Bauhaus architecture and balloon animal.

 

These creatures I create can express powerful emotion that I cannot by other means. They are manifestations of the subconscious boiling over into a world where feelings are not often expressed. I see them as a personal pantheon: gods and spirits I invented to explain the complex and confusing nature of modern life. Like my experience of the world, my art is a mixture of the profane and profound, the silly with the serious."