05.13.10
Are these your most complexly layered paintings to date (etc)
These paintings are an extension of ideas I have been pursuing for years. I’m interested in a shifty, unsettled experience, about order and disorder, structures that hold only to a point, where one layer or element is eroded or consumed by another—taking pleasure in the tangle of things. In many of these paintings, especially the larger ones, the level of complexity is definitely increased as I pursue that end.
The number of references has expanded (etc)
There’s not a list, but a number of motifs have emerged that I employ in various ways. There’s a highly improvisational aspect to the start of each painting. Then I often figure out how to incorporate additional elements. Often, more geometric or organized areas come up against something more fluid, agitated or seemingly disordered. The greater shifts between areas of distinctly different qualities add to the degree of complexity relative to earlier paintings.
Flat, graphic stars (etc)
It’s a completely symmetrical, highly organized, reductivist representation of pure light. Light is important to my paintings. But the very graphic star is not a source of light in the paintings. A much more useful graphic element I employ to that end is what I might refer to as a pie-shaped value scale. Through the simplest symmetric ordering of values—black to white—light is provided. They can appear as a solid shield-like element or glowing beam. I like the duality. The star is more useful as a symmetrical element. I’ve used it, doubled, in the center of a couple of paintings. Symmetry also brings in the body, and so the doubled stars could be stand-ins for eyes. (Bootsy Collins.) A number of paintings I’ve done, including the big dark one and the wall painting in this show, are built around symmetrical armatures, creating an ordered balance as a starting point to which the rest of the mess takes off.
What about the pits (etc)
Well, yes, I’m interested in paintings that reward a certain pleasure in a sustained view. The pits or chambers, as you call them, provide a moment of concrete yet enigmatic architectural clarity embedded in far more transitory surroundings. They perhaps suggest a wormhole or exit, an escape or a way to fall more deeply in.
In a few instances I find myself considering skin (etc)
The idea of pulse and flow of a circulatory system of moving through a painting is terrific. There are ways to look at these paintings as referring to the body and at times that body’s limits seem under attack or capable of oozing, distending or overflowing. The body is fragile and subject to an inevitable turn toward disorder.
Since you usually don’t make smallish paintings (etc)
Absolutely. In doing so, I approach each painting as a completely unique entity. As opposed to thinking of them as somehow small versions of big paintings, studies for big paintings or distillations of elements of big paintings. They are fully engaging to make, and stand apart from the big paintings or stand on there own, as it were. Scale is important in all the work. The wall painting provides a whole other level to approach things on an architectural scale. My ability in the small paintings to pursue varied approaches, introduce elements and freely forage is great.
Temperature has always been one of your (etc)
I make no predictions or promises. I just let the paintings take me where they want to go. I’m really pleased with the expansion of my current means. It affords me lots of areas to move around in. Things have been heating up lately, as you put it, and we’ll see where it leads. Every painting in this show was started the same way, with a drip of paint allowed to meander across the surface of the canvas as I tilted it back and forth. A barely controlled or controllable accident, which provides the armature that I then respond to in various ways. I’m trying to keep the whole trajectory of the work as unpredictable as that starting point.
04.12.01
What Inspired all this softness?
In these paintings form is established through the relationships among an array of representational devices, one of which is this soft ground on which other elements--line, pattern, color--establish their often ambiguous relationships. The many elements in the painting present a range of different sorts of materiality / immateriality. The softness is about creating a silvery light, a distinctly different sort of focus from the other elements in the paintings.
Drawing seems to have become a more important element.
This group of paintings is on one level about form and physicality. The way in which drawing is essentially a trace of a physical action, establishes a visceral element that is in turn played off of transparency and atmospheric subtleties elsewhere in the paintings.
Is this the first time since the early 80’s that you’ve had such a specific, dimensional form in your paintings?
Yes, there’s always been a spatial component and often an illusion of light, but this is for sure the deepest I’ve gone into the representation of volume in a long time. I’m interested in creating paintings that speak to an appetite for complexity - things happening simultaneously with unexpected intersections producing combustions that set off other reactions that continue to reverberate as you look. Introducing an illusion of 3 dimensional form into the painting provides one more strong element to mix into the stew.
Water, under water looking out?
Water is the most different physical environment we can experience on earth. The feeling of weightlessness is evoked at times in the paintings. The sense of fluid relationships, things not fixed, the ideas of currents, a river of fresh water moving under the sea.
Any comments about surface, decoration, and meaning?
Well, I’m trying to use this idea of different layers: the crust, the skin, a film, an incision - a line that corresponds to a form, then ignores it. A pattern that establishes a weight that is heavier than the object it covers as a metaphor. I’d like to provide an experience that allows the viewer an opportunity to look at something that feels like thought: unfocused, concentrated, dreamy, analytic, dyslexic, humorous, though.
06.03.99
These new paintings take quite a jump. What happened?
Well, certainly there are elements that distinguish these paintings from the last ones I showed with you. But I find just as many elements that have been carried over, both formally and conceptually. The biggest change may be that I’ve found a way to deal with the idea of slippage--or the unfixed--which has been in play in my work for a very long time, and to collide it with the immediacy of the emblematic. These paintings were the result of extracting small sections of far more complicated paintings--based on a grid or net--I was working on this winter. The central motif in these paintings can be viewed as a modular element derived from those larger net structures. Another difference is that making these paintings was less labor-intensive--they were more fun, in fact, to make than my paintings of the last few years. I was in a very good mood making these paintings.
Do you consider them high-speed, stop-action shots?
Certainly, moments of accelerated change draw our attention, whatever the context, whether it’s on the molecular, socio-economic level or a change in the weather. Clearly, within the realm of technology, we’re in one of those accelerated moments--have been throughout the century--and right now change feels very intimate to a lot of people. If the paintings are able to capture a sense of the optimistic exuberance and the unsettledness and disquiet that accompany rapid change, then I succeed at articulating something that feels like where we’re at.
Are you specifically playing off elements of the comic book in your use of color, distortion, and extreme exaggeration?
The color that seems reminiscent of specific sources is often juxtaposed in the painting with color that is clearly from some other palette, creating another opportunity for a slight dissonance, adding to the overall flux in the work. I am interested in the way distortion and extreme exaggeration is expressed within the reductivist vocabulary of the comic book. The grotesque as a fanciful elaboration of form contradicts so directly the tenets of modern reductivism, yet the minimal means employed in their mass production mirrored, if not partly begat the impulse toward reduction in many modernist painters.
What about the science--the inner- and outer-space look?
I don’t know. Perhaps that is a function of the ambivalent scale that shifts you from the microscopic to some cosmic construction, but I think that’s a fairly pedestrian reaction to lots of so-called abstract painting. Maybe the way the paintings seem to shift between the familiar and the unfamiliar mirrors the attempt science-fiction writers make to acclimate us to the new.
How did you come to this flirtation with photography?
Photography is such an omnipresent fixture in our landscape. It seems natural to refer to it in work that attempts, at least in part, to reflect the world in which it exists. As I’m also interested in a form of abstract painting that allows for a sort of representational element, I’ve alluded to a look of printedness, photographic or electronic imaging, etc. Essentially I am working with a variety of elements that have associative resonance, which in the entire constellation of the painting’s parts produce a complex and unlocatable place.
What brought about this seemingly new use of the hand-painted?
That’s a curious question because my work has always been exclusively hand-painted. I have never used anything more technologically advanced than a paintbrush, but I think I know what you’re referring to. There are areas in these paintings where the brush-mark and even the time in putting down the paint seems immediately decipherable. On one hand, it’s an effort to make explicit use of the particular paintedness as an element, and collide that with parts of the painting that seem to evoke cooler media. At the same time, a section put down in a painterly way may have color characteristics that allude to Xerox or comic book color, so its reading is less fixed than it first appears.
Since the early ‘80’s, you’ve made abstract paintings. Despite the painting-is-dead syndrome, how or why did painting remain vital to you during all those years?
The idea that a particular practice within the cultural realm would somehow outlive its ability to change is accepted. Painting seems unequivocally capable of phenomenal flexibility, as it is so inextricably connected to a tremendous history. The epidemic of anemic work we are surrounded by presently, including much painting, may be a function of our voracious appetite for novelty. For myself, the prescribed parameters that define a particular art form allows greater concentration on the content and meaning of the work in place of the constant distraction in finding novel form.