Statement I
Looking at the contemporary art world, I find that I am an outsider, an outlier or worse; but I have no choice about the vein I work in.
The work I most admire is blatantly in love with nature. When I see Egon Schiele drawings (not so much the mannered early work but the later, more direct work) I think, what else is there to do but draw people (or houses, chairs) with such devastating passion and intelligence?
When I get tired of working in the sky-trees-fields landscape style I think of Charles Burchfield. His openness and ecstasy before nature is humbling. Obviously all I can do is pursue my own awe. Wyeth said one’s work goes as deep and as far as one’s love. I believe that.
Statement II
For twenty years I was an open-air impressionist. Some combination of field, sky and telephone pole would strike me and I would squint at it, judging how it would fit onto my rectangle. Sometimes while driving around looking for themes I would park and walk back to a scene I just passed, and find it had vanished. I was beginning to learn how the mind stitches together experience through time and across places. Everyone knows memory is a fiction, an active creation, but so is the eternal present. This explains how a comitted en plein air painter could be deeply moved by a landscape- yet when he sets up the easel and looks out would think, somewhat wordlessly- is this it? My experience couldn’t be captured in any given glance- it’s compiled over time and selectively edited.
Now I paint from memory. This gives me freedom to assemble a scene without being a slave to the facts- I smush things together, take other things out, don’t end up compulsively painting every branch or parked car- I’m more in tune with mood. I seek fidelity to my experience of a place, not my retinal vision. Yet my new paintings are no capriccios- they are vitally connected to my real experience of the city, and too much departure from what I saw makes me go cold.
My painting practice is to go out and look, usually in one particular place, for around an hour, to get enough ‘juice’ to go paint. I absorb a place by looking at it, sometimes memorizing details, sometimes more generally taking it in. I encounter a lot of cars, billboards, and buses on walks in my favorite neighborhood, but beyond all that, I feel an inebriating mix of ocean air and ocean light, Greek temples (gigantic warehouses with stately pediments) perched on the shore, the streets all ramping down to the sea, and always the raven hair of the locals gleaming in the sun. But these sensations are filtered out from a significant amount of noise. From a certain perspective, our streets reflect a demoralized, bronze age in which all new building is careless and ugly, but for a handful of exceptions, and public space is increasingly rented out to advertisers. Yet soulfulness still persists in corners of Brooklyn, especially those connected to the sea. But it can’t be pointed to or hardly even sought- it’s seen out of the corner of the eye. An artist’s job is to fasten that fleeting sensation.
Statement III- monotypes
Monotypes are made by applying etching ink to a Plexiglas plate and transferring the image to paper. I make a piece in one sitting of 2-5 hours, applying the tacky black ink with a roller, fingers and brush. Subtractive wipes with a rag are also important. Because ‘light’ in a monotype is the paper showing through, it shares a fresh, translucent quality with watercolor. But Plexiglas is such a forgiving surface- so easy to wipe down and start anew- there is no pressure to “get it right the first time,” as with watercolor. The only permanent mark is the printing itself- the bonding of the ink with cotton fiber.
There is a certain distance, and therefore freedom, in making a monotype, because you never know what it will look like until you pull the paper off the plate. On the most mundane level, the printed image is reversed, but it also breathes a queerly unintended atmosphere and mood.
Looking at the contemporary art world, I find that I am an outsider, an outlier or worse; but I have no choice about the vein I work in.
The work I most admire is blatantly in love with nature. When I see Egon Schiele drawings (not so much the mannered early work but the later, more direct work) I think, what else is there to do but draw people (or houses, chairs) with such devastating passion and intelligence?
When I get tired of working in the sky-trees-fields landscape style I think of Charles Burchfield. His openness and ecstasy before nature is humbling. Obviously all I can do is pursue my own awe. Wyeth said one’s work goes as deep and as far as one’s love. I believe that.
Statement II
For twenty years I was an open-air impressionist. Some combination of field, sky and telephone pole would strike me and I would squint at it, judging how it would fit onto my rectangle. Sometimes while driving around looking for themes I would park and walk back to a scene I just passed, and find it had vanished. I was beginning to learn how the mind stitches together experience through time and across places. Everyone knows memory is a fiction, an active creation, but so is the eternal present. This explains how a comitted en plein air painter could be deeply moved by a landscape- yet when he sets up the easel and looks out would think, somewhat wordlessly- is this it? My experience couldn’t be captured in any given glance- it’s compiled over time and selectively edited.
Now I paint from memory. This gives me freedom to assemble a scene without being a slave to the facts- I smush things together, take other things out, don’t end up compulsively painting every branch or parked car- I’m more in tune with mood. I seek fidelity to my experience of a place, not my retinal vision. Yet my new paintings are no capriccios- they are vitally connected to my real experience of the city, and too much departure from what I saw makes me go cold.
My painting practice is to go out and look, usually in one particular place, for around an hour, to get enough ‘juice’ to go paint. I absorb a place by looking at it, sometimes memorizing details, sometimes more generally taking it in. I encounter a lot of cars, billboards, and buses on walks in my favorite neighborhood, but beyond all that, I feel an inebriating mix of ocean air and ocean light, Greek temples (gigantic warehouses with stately pediments) perched on the shore, the streets all ramping down to the sea, and always the raven hair of the locals gleaming in the sun. But these sensations are filtered out from a significant amount of noise. From a certain perspective, our streets reflect a demoralized, bronze age in which all new building is careless and ugly, but for a handful of exceptions, and public space is increasingly rented out to advertisers. Yet soulfulness still persists in corners of Brooklyn, especially those connected to the sea. But it can’t be pointed to or hardly even sought- it’s seen out of the corner of the eye. An artist’s job is to fasten that fleeting sensation.
Statement III- monotypes
Monotypes are made by applying etching ink to a Plexiglas plate and transferring the image to paper. I make a piece in one sitting of 2-5 hours, applying the tacky black ink with a roller, fingers and brush. Subtractive wipes with a rag are also important. Because ‘light’ in a monotype is the paper showing through, it shares a fresh, translucent quality with watercolor. But Plexiglas is such a forgiving surface- so easy to wipe down and start anew- there is no pressure to “get it right the first time,” as with watercolor. The only permanent mark is the printing itself- the bonding of the ink with cotton fiber.
There is a certain distance, and therefore freedom, in making a monotype, because you never know what it will look like until you pull the paper off the plate. On the most mundane level, the printed image is reversed, but it also breathes a queerly unintended atmosphere and mood.