They come from mindsets that have kind
of merged together, allowing me to make the cartoonish abstractions
I make now. The illustration, center top, is from over 20 years ago, the painting
up-left is very large, a first introduction to the "other
side,"
from around 1989; below the illustration is pre-graduate school from about
1994. The mostly grey one is from graduate school, 1996, mentioned
again below.
The stories are different — very different takes on the world,
but a frantic, tumbling energy is always there. It seems important
to me now that I was able to merge all this (especially those scrambling
caricatures in the illustration at top) into the work I'm doing
now. Superficially the effect may seem comedic, not serious enough,
irreverent; but it's become clear to me that very little irony
or irreverence actually persists in my work. The humor I see in
them relates more to the puzzled embarrassment of seeing clearly
your own mortality than any kind of witty irony.
Painting for me often feels like I'm opening my eyes while dreaming:
the shapes and colors are clear but the meaning of the forms they're
attached to isn't. The reason comes later, and a good part of my
energy in making art goes toward playing out and solidifying a
sort of "fuzzy-logic"
that comes from a need to make sense of nonsense.
The large painting from 1996 is called "It Saw Me and Hid" which,
although the title sounds like some kind of boasting bravado on
my part, has more to do with spotting something unknown, primordial,
sentient, and in turn being encountered by it. The thing vanishes —
camouflages itself before my eyes. Did I really see this thing?
Was it what I thought it was? Was it worth searching for? Fleeting
or fleeing?
Our minds are constantly "thinking." This is the default
condition. So when I start making a picture my mind does what it
naturally does and puzzles out the shapes, colors, relationships
and meanings. It begins with the first mark — the imagined
logic starts building from the beginning and seems to continue
rolling on its own accord throughout the making of the painting.
(I'm not suggesting that it's unconscious, only that the part of
my mind that understands and relates to this logic has a different
place in my head than the "me"
I engage with the world with and even the "me"
that enjoys looking at the paintings when they're finished.) A
hierarchical better/worse scenario seems to develop and I find
myself in a frenzy of likes, dislikes, loyalties, innovation — and
then there is this looming sense of failure, or more accurately,
a sense of meaninglessness, and it's a battle against time to find
the meaning and solidify it. This is where the title of "It
Saw Me and Hid" comes from, this constant despair of losing
the significance of the meaning I thought I just discovered.
It has always taken me an incredibly long time to make anything,
in fact if anything stands out to me as a defining clue to my "process" it
is that I need to work something until near ruin and then "bring
it back."
I think now that a lot of the "overworking"
originates from really trying to pin down the thing I'm painting.
Repositioning it slightly over and over —
refining and contemplating a shape or suite of shapes until every
aspect is understood and deliberate.