Statement

“The universe as we observe it is the only reasonable starting point in cosmology.”

Stephen Hawking

Mystical musings, messy interactions, provisional notions, and pleasures. I’ve been trying to find a way to put paint into words for years, but it always remains one step ahead of me. The elements of a painting make no sense to a logical mind, like an equation that mixes its units, yet occasionally add up to spaces that hold together my disparate thoughts. The only way I know how to do it is to place one mark on a surface at a time and see where it leads.

Still, there are a few ideas that guide me:

I’ll begin with the subject, that thing the painting is about. I can think of nothing more important because as Del Close (one of the founders of modern improv) put it, “My friends, you are all under the misconception that you are the most important person on the stage. You are not. Your scene partner is.” Painting is the language of the scene.

Next come the materials, and my task (it seems to me) is to return continually to this beautiful elemental substance on a palette known as paint and to transform it into something substantial and revealing about the subject.

For this, I take my time. A teacher once told me I like to potchke (i.e. I like to tinker through a slow, messy, or inefficient process). Although my paintings have the appearance of a quick study, I tend to be suspicious of any premature response. I generally live with a painting, respond to it, inhabit it, and change it many times over to achieve something more lasting and believable.

By the time I’m finished a painting is the sum of countless ideas, decisions, emotions, hesitations, false starts, and frankly, a lot of inconsistencies. But this is the mystery that lies at the heart of making art. There are acts of accumulation and acts of disassembly, and it’s often hard to say what makes it all work – sheer competence or articulate description isn’t enough. As the poet A.R. Ammons once wrote to a friend, “No, I don’t like a poem too perfect & beautiful, but flawed and great.”

The paintings are comprised of shapes (some quirky, some elegant) fitted together in ways not altogether without contradiction. They can be playful and serious, moving and still, reticent and radiant, weighted and weightless. I try to hold everything together in some miraculous delicate balance.

I like to think my paintings are what happens when curiosity collides with reality, the trees talk back, and cosmic forces run amok. The funny thing about art is that it will succeed with or without a coherent argument. What emerges in these paintings is a quiet, persistent state of consciousness, both a reflection of nature and a liberation of the mind from nature.