October 7 - November 13, 2021
From Craighead-Green Gallery:
“I work intuitively and instinctively. My work is visceral. It’s not conceptual; it’s physical and experiential.
I work best when I’m open and loose and a little reckless, setting aside the restrictive tendency of my rational mind. By being direct and avoiding self-censorship and doubt, more interesting things happen and I am less prone to contrivance.
I start a painting merely putting down what notions or impulses are at hand. I generate information and get it out in front of me where I can respond to it, where I have something to work with. The gestures, colors, shapes, images that appear initiate a dialogue I will continue through the course of the painting.
Generally I’ll have several paintings going, each at its own stage of the process. I reach periods with a painting where I have to step back and let the piece ‘work’ on me. Eventually I get agitated, irritated with it, as the painting gives me the sense of what more it needs.
When a painting becomes lifelessly closed or predictable, it means I need to let go – especially of those aspects of the painting to which I have become the most attached. Destruction, impulsivity, and accidents are a big part of my process. I take liberty to paint over, to cut and rip, to obliterate. I avoid wearing blinders so as not to miss the opportunity for discovery. Something emerges from the cacophony of relationships within the painting – a thread that is meaningful to me. Sometimes I might lose it or it may go nowhere. Sometimes it leads me to a place I like that I haven’t been before.
A central conviction of mine is that any really good piece transcends itself; where the materials and techniques employed become insignificant. To me it’s the experience that counts. That something comprised of ordinary, mundane material – cardboard, crayons, string – can embody the intrinsic expressive power to spellbind and delight is compelling to me. Picasso said it: “It’s what one finds, not how he gets there, that is the thing”. That I can occasionally and to some degree happen upon this experience in my own work is what keeps me going as an artist.”
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