Art should not abstract human emotion. Ferrari Sheppard can show you how it’s done

Artist Ferrari Sheppard in his L.A. studio. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t really respect that early on, because I’m just like, “This is a video game, a social experiment.” I viewed it more like an art project than anything. “I take notes while I’m in the studio because I’m always trying to understand why I do things and why I don’t do things,” says Sheppard. If you’re writing a movie script or if you’re writing a story, you don’t want the last portion of it — the conclusion — to just say, “And that was it.” That doesn’t live on. In talking about his paintings, Sheppard says he can “bend the shape, the form, the figure,” but he can’t “abstract human emotion.” More stories from Image