My View of Painting

For me painting is a mode of being in the world – a koan not to be solved, but lived.

And like working the koan I have to “shipwreck my own thinking” about what painting is – in order to make painting an act of authentic choosing.

I also have to have enough doubt for the work to be itself, in order for the painting’s fullness to surface.

In my work I am interested in both what is hidden and what is manifesting.

Anything that strikes chords of associations and reverberations, coincidentia oppositorum = “coincidence of opposites”, contradictions/paradoxes=brushwork (acting in paragestural ways), composition, “meaning.”

I am also interested in representing time and space within painting. I see the act of painting as an act of duration. Only secondarily it is an object.

I believe in Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses”, Wittgenstein’s “bewitchment of our intelligence.” So I believe there must be a certain wildness to painting (Cezanne: a painter has to have a dog’s eye).

But I also believe in a kind of Mallarmean Project: a single painting is not as important as the Body of Painting. (A “finished painting” moves from one work to another.)