Current Paintings: 2011-2013
SEEKING QUESTIONS TO LIFE'S
BIG ANSWERS
When I painted landscape imagery and the constructed environment years ago, I liked to talk about formal concerns: painting as map or diary or arena linking visual and verbal, conceptual and material, fact and fiction, abstraction and representation; not to mention a blend of styles and a viewer building bridges between disparate ideas. While all this remains true, with the paintings today I would say that, given how many images we are all bombarded with every day via the media, I am simply interested in making memorable ones.
The figure has taken center stage
these days, and my goal with the guys who dominate the images
and constitute my muse is to present them as everyman, reaching
beyond the fleeting surface idealization associated with youth
and hopefully going far in terms of metaphor, poking around such
timeless ideas as: truth, beauty, faith, time, the infinite,
what we learn and what we know. It may seem questionable indeed
these days to even concern myself with such unanswerables, but
in an era when political and spiritual leaders assert that they
in fact have the answers for us all, I think that art has the
capacity to imagine otherwise, to offer some transcendent spark
to bridge the gap between intent and form, between idea and the
evidence of our lives. Muse indeed.
_____________
Note: At times my focus is on paper works in series, for instance the MUSE/MUSEUM watercolors, BACK TO BACK OF THE YARDS collages, and TATTOO DETOUR drawings from Honolulu. Therefore, select images from these series have been incorporated onto this page along with the "usual" canvases. More images from these series can be found on their dedicated pages. Also, some works from 2010 and earlier appear at the end of this page to give something of a broader overview.
Across all of my work since 2002, I have been assigning sequence numbers in keeping with the idea of document and diary. Sometimes when I take a very long time to resolve a particular work I give it two numbers -- where it was in the queue when I first began, and where it was when I finished, thereby implying that the intervening works can have informed it in some way. This is especially true when I go back and rework something that I had "finished" years earlier. For me the work is always fair game for reappraisal -- something that seems to happen in everyday life as well.
