STATEMENT OF WORK

I am an observational painter these days, making still-life paintings of handmade gold mirrors and the contradictory spaces they reflect. Observational, not representational. To merely represent is to illustrate, to be wedded to cliché depictions of objects in logical space. To observe is to follow (the eye, the accidents of paint, a tradition of painting) and, in following, See something new. If I hope to represent anything, it is Seeing itself—the instability of vision, the role the mind plays in organizing phenomena into coherence, the process of constructing new wholes from fragments of our past (personal, communal, artistic, historical).

We observe, in the sense of Seeing, and we observe, in the sense of keeping faith. The Byzantine icon, as a material object that mediates between the mundane world (of clichés) and a divine state (of Seeing), is a starting point of the tradition I follow. In another life, I might have been a monk, painting the Virgin repeatedly. But (no longer even Christian) I share little with this alter ego besides a penchant for black tunics and a (some would say, overserious) devotion to my religion (painting). My faith does not promise reward, earthly or divine, in the future, but right now, if only one looks to See. A painting exists right in front of our eyes! (The kingdom of god is at hand!)

I appropriate the gold from Byzantine icons, making mirrors with an ancient gilding technique of affixing gold leaf to glass. The squares of gold wrinkle and break as I apply them, creating a fragmented and mirrored grid into which I etch drawings of paintings from the idiosyncratic tradition I see my work in (my patron Painting saints): Botticelli’s Annunciation, Rothko’s No. 13, Guston’s Ancient Wall. These mirrors are complex objects to paint from life. Installed on my studio walls, each reflects its surroundings while maintaining its own form, filtering the present environment through etched reminders of past painterly paradigms. They contain contradictory spatial views to be synthesized in a single painting: the object’s space (the mirror on the wall), the reflected space (my windowless studio), the space of the surface on which I’m painting. 

My painting process draws from historical materials and techniques: rabbit skin glue, egg tempera, oil paint. Through addition and subtraction, scraping away with a blade (flagellation, doubt) and building up layers of paint (observance, faith), I wrestle like Jacob with my painting angels, trying to wrest from the past a meaningful and forward-looking present, avoiding the temptation of nostalgia and nihilism. The resulting paintings appear abstract at first glance, complicated by the specificity of observation and indications of extended space. With prolonged looking (Seeing), anchored by occasional recognizable objects, viewers can ground themselves in a painterly space that must be reconstructed (Seen) in their mind—an ideal space beyond cliché, made accessible to us through a painting that is here, now: an ideal world we can See together, and in Seeing, recommit to the world we share.