Friday, August 19, 2016

I'm always moving along. My paintings are always works
in process for a long time. I have them and come back intermittently maybe for a year or two. I can't really do "one, two, a painting". I try to work quickly but that doesn't usually work for me. My paintings are an on-going process of sedimentation? then excavation? Or something like urban renewal? Maybe due to shifts of sensibility? Choices of line, color, texture,opacity or transparency, density or sparseness, flatness or depth, warmth or coolness...volume?

 This one, called "Conjugational" evolved over several months of painting in, and painting out, and then reading some of Paul Klee's observations about line and volume, and "seeing" what the painting could be. Finally it became itself. Someone who saw it recently said it was funny, and now I know it is. The viewer completes the work...

Thursday, August 18, 2016

I'll be talking about my painting tonight at Cocoa Bar in Brooklyn. I have several works on view there, with fellow artists Amy Weil and Carlos Torres-Machado. Thinking about what to say, I came across this quote from Brice Marden that greatly inspired me awhile back:
"There are possibilities to make paintings that people don't pursue. The whole post-modernist thing is about closing down possibilities--that's just bullshit. What about magic? Okay, magic. You look at all the religious paintings very formally, you look at them historically, but what about Zubaran painting something and just going out of himself. To me it's possible. It was a big thing with the abstract expressionists. How you could go and paint and work but there was only a small amount of time when you really painted. And that was when you were in another state. You're coasting right along, you're not even thinking. It's just all coming out. You're the medium, and to me that exists. This could be an aim." -interview in BOMB.

Francisco Zurbaran, St. Francis in Meditation