Statement

I’ve painted most of my life, yet I never know beforehand where a painting should go. Working without a plan, the picture often assumes several incarnations over its gestation; it can be finished multiple times. During the process the surface activity gets increasingly complex and resplendent, sometimes a bit dizzying. Over the course of my life I’ve learned to push a picture over the line of what is reasonable. It has never really been different for me. I am not troubled by what some might regard as excess labor because I have always been enchanted by paint; not only the colors but the stuff, itself.

Detail in my paintings is always subordinate, yet fortuitous incidents often add to the total effect. Once I choose to leave something by chance in a painting it can no longer be regarded as an accident for it has been subsequently incorporated into the whole. It was Delacroix who said, ‘Seek the whole.” That is still true about art and what separates it from life.

Art is almost like walking and tripping over something of real value, some “stuff’ that really opens one’s eyes. So the amount of work put into the picture doesn’t necessarily pay off in the end. Yet the longer I paint the more I am able to keep a picture open and myself expectant. Sometimes you can get a glimpse but it proves illusory. I hope to transform fugitive and ephemeral emotions into something substantial – something that lasts.

As painting follows painting there is no guarantee of progress. The last painting often does not improve on the previous one. My work has frustrating dips, reversals, and wild goose chases. Artists don’t like to repeat themselves or repeat what has worked in the past. We have no choice but to follow the dictates of our fascinations.