PAINTING IN GENERAL

I am interested in painting that is formally abstract and yet referential. The images are arrived at through a process of unconscious painting. As the work progresses, opportunities present themselves, form is teased out, a nexus of color asserts itself and an image takes shape. My personal relationship to the imagery, whether it is a collection of books, artifacts, or the stuff that makes up a life, has to do with loss, ambition, impermanence, memory, and identity.

THE GUTENBERG VARIATIONS

Both paintings and books are depositories of ideas. We experience the pages of a book as flat—black ink on white paper—but a book has space in the way a painting has space, through ideas and conventions. The books we read and the paintings we live with, define and reveal us. Just as a book requires the reader to assemble images and ideas out of its signs and symbols, the viewer of a painting is asked to translate the strokes and drips into reason and emotion. In recent works, vases are taking up residence on the shelves alongside the books. They are vessels of another kind, just like the painting they inhabit. 

THINGS FALL APART

In this series I wanted to deal with pictorial depth, weight, light and shadow. The subject of nondescript objects or parts of things is a surrogate for the ambition to make something in a world of impermanence. This conceit lends itself to improvisation, discovery and play. I try to keep the process open and unconscious for as long as possible. Ultimately, the need for pictorial strategies asserts itself and I respond to formal opportunities to construct an image that makes sense to me.