Writings

January 27, 2008

This may sound naïve – but I’m interested in making a real contribution.

I still believe that it’s possible –

January 9, 2006

When art is successful it acts as a hinge, allowing us to go back and forth between at least two simultaneous realities – and in a sense allows for a collapsing of the inner and the outer into one reality – the transitional object moving us in the opposite direction of the infant’s movement.

December 8, 2005

How does one create sacred space?

I’m thinking of the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries that I encountered in Ladakh – how utterly stunning they were, and so completely saturated with thick presence.  If I were to create an installation that would be the direction.

There’s a way that I think of my paintings, my associations, where there is an implicit circular structure, the way the space is held in the rectangle, a holding place, womblike.  That circular structure reminds me of Byzantine icons and Eastern mandalas.  I also think of analytic cubism, particularly of Braque, where he seems to be exploring void more than Picasso who is so much about form.  The presence in the void.  The breaking down of forms, cracking them open.  “There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.” – L.C.  The breaking of the vessels.

Titian, Corot, Morandi, Cezanne, Giacometti, de Kooning, Diebenkorn, Auerbach, El Greco, Tibetan thankas, Turrell.

It’s not enough to express an idea – how does one conjure up a space?

December 20, 2005

The secret is in the edges.

The secret is in the edges – where things meet – that’s where we find the relationships between things – how we perceive the nature of the relationships between things, that is, how we understand the nature of reality.  Not in some esoteric sense, but in this very life.  As Beuys said – the mystery is in the main station.

Once, as I was watching a performance of The Knee Plays by Robert Wilson, I was sitting in the back, student tickets, across the aisle from the soundboard.  David Byrne came and sat next to the soundboard in the aisle, that is, next to me.  As one scene transitioned into another I examined the outline of the performance — a pamphlet that displayed a series of schematic pictures of what was to go on stage – and I tried to figure out just what exactly was going on up there on the stage.  After watching my confusion for a moment, Byrne leaned over, swished his pen back and forth over the pamphlet pictures, and said in Byrneian crispness, “Here we are…in between.”

So it is.

Bailey said something about that once – about edges, something about how the overall tone of an object can be fairly solid and even, without any real gradation, and it will still work spatially if the edges are right.  That is, our sense of space and form depends greatly on the quality of the edges.

“When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you have to think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. It is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.”

Stanley Kunitz
1905-2006
from The Wild Braid, W.W. Norton, 2005

January 25, 2008

It’s not unlike refraining from engaging with the wisdom of the body because of its having become a target of the commodification of corporate culture.

July 30, 2007

They’re not just different styles.  They’re different ontological accounts.  Not just different states of being – they’re different ways of being.

When Hardy was teaching us about consistency throughout the painting he was talking about not only consistency of mark as such, but what led to that, and came from that – consistency of attention, consistency of presence, consistency of thought.

He was teaching us how to master and wield our tools and materials and also how to wield and master our thought and attention.

What does it mean to return to a painting with a consistent frame of mind?

And that leads to the possibility of wielding different frames of mind, different energies, within a painting.  Particularly two – destructive and creative – eros and thanatos – and using them to develop a larger sense of wholeness than would otherwise be possible.

September 3, 2004

Seeing rather clearly in this recent piece (“Blond”, 48”x42”) the influence of El Greco.  The swimming of forms and exchange of space and objects.  The undulation.  Even the odd kind of “outlining” of the couch by the end table.

September 21, 2004

In order to bring the painting to wholeness, to “finish”, there needs to be an equivalent measure of inner coherence within oneself. This inner coherence doesn’t need to precede the arrival of the wholeness of the painting, but may in fact arrive inwardly in concert with the outward manifestation. This inner and outer sense of wholeness and coherence is led and guided by one’s vision, one’s sense of the deeper rhythms and the presence of things…As Natalie said, without vision artmaking becomes mere design.

February 25, 2008

It’s so curious – this experience of painting, like walking in the dark. The anxiety and contraction disabling the inner compass and it’s like walking in the dark, one piece after another, bit by bit without any clear sense of fit. An act of perseverance, in spite of the blindness, in spite of the disrupting anxiety. An act of faith.

Then, without preamble, without notice, unbidden, there’s a clearing, a growing, regained sense of heart, the chest becomes more sensitive, more spacious and the world feels of a piece again, available, possible. And what came before reacquaints itself as contributing and adding up towards this moment – whether true or not, it’s the sense of it that counts.

Like emerging from a dark, cramped, earthen tunnel, out into the air, the visible world – ‘light’ is almost too celebratory, but yes – out into the light, perhaps still a bit dimmed, but out into light.