STATEMENT OF WORK

I want my painting to have the resonance of drawing: from life, on experience, towards the honest and true, searching. I am drawn towards paintings as pictures almost as much as I am drawn to them as paintings or objects. I want my paintings to be abstract, but I want even more for them to be figurative, and I want even more for them to be literal. I think that art is something to live with and to be haunted by. Sometimes I begin with a scene from the Bible or Ancient Greece, Hermann Hesse, Caravaggio, or a dream. Then there is an interruption and I let it go. I want to make pictures I could not have imagined and I want to make them in a way that keeps me wondering. Generally I begin with one material and let it suggest the next. Paper suggests ink, and then ink suggests charcoal. This is just one example but it is one that I like. I like found materials, cheap materials, fine materials, and soot. I like things to be in motion, to be pushed and to transform according to their nature. I am looking for it. Sometimes for this reason I work from things that are moving: pigeons, video, etc. I think that the attempt to draw from things in motion expresses the paradoxical nature of painting, its absurdity. I am interested in absurdity and refutation, but I think there is no refutation without proposition, and my proposition is painting. I think that nature is a good teacher but I also think it is a bad teacher. I think it needs us too. I suppose this is a religious disposition, God in search of man. It goes hand in hand with man in search of image, image in search of truth, and truth moving silently away.