The form that my work takes is oil painting but the paradigm I’m interested in within painting is that of an imprint, a trace, or a copy. I find myself on the side of not wanting the image and yet it feels unavoidable. I want to recover form, and to forget myself (in parts), but how? By way of emphasizing certain qualities and aesthetics of reproduction the texture of the image overwhelms the availability of the illusion. The attention to the surface interrupts the picture. This inertia drags against the speed and force of illusion.  The image is there but as an after image, or is deconstructed. The photo of the photo, the recurrence of the same figure again, the dopplegangers when seen together look different. Tears accumulate as mere “sadness,” rather than melodrama; excitement freed from reaction formation steadies itself as mere “interest”; fetish and form tussle.  My paintings are a discovery of form that is second or third hand. 

In his book Philosophy and Belief David-Levi Strauss quotes the Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilem Flusser from his book Towards a Philosophy of Photography, “‘The apparatus functions just as the universe does,
namely, automatically,’
which is evil.
So we need ‘envisioners,’
producers of technical images
who ‘try to turn an automatic apparatus against its own condition of being automatic.’
The unrelenting techno-optimism has a pessimistic counter:
’the world has be come meaningless,
and consciousness will find nothing there
but so many disconnected elements.'” Images of paintings are a kind of surveillance; they condition and control the way painting behaves.

In my early life, I would often find myself waiting for an indeterminate amount of time. To relieve the stress of this, to forget my situation for a while, I began to draw. I learned from how-to books to draw things systematically, like a head or a horse. From very early on I realized that to become self reliant meant finding out how to make an abstract painting because no image would be needed. I paint from a sense of place. 

I’m very attuned to composition, which is basically the subtle hierarchy of how something is organized. The regular gaps in my day were a kind of composition, in that being alone with myself, emerged as important. Time itself emerged as important. Drawing made me look more closely at the world and at myself in it but then there was the problem of staying inside of the drawing, of continuous play. My relationship to time and drawing is still evident in how I go about making things. Eventually, art became a way of connecting to the world and to other artists and thinkers who both agree with me and do things differently – both are of great interest.

People bring their own meanings to things, their own context for looking.  Circumstances and events create patterns of recognition. The world today is very complex and my paintings are way for me to to acknowledge the complexity, especially the way mediation influences perception. 

I am indebted to painting practices of the 60’s and 70’s that experimented with painting as gesture and object, feminist practices that interrogated the signifiers of “expression,” and the relationship of painting to the institutions that gave it value. But also to the formalists who have taught me how to look right at the object and broke it apart.

I paint and draw quickly and then work to arrange and organize almost like editing a text. The oil paint is layered and flexible like mud. I draw into it and move it around with a palette knife. With each new painting I’m exploring ideas from old paintings or searching to understand something about another painter’s work. I find that if you just start with no idea all, something related with emerge. I try not to have too many ideas because I’m a believer in trying things out; it’s all an open question with both few and many solutions.

My father was a builder and I idealized the blueprints he carried with him. He liked to communicate ideas by sketching things on a napkin, and I learned to do this too. Maps and schematics only make sense locally, where as pictures work as fragments separate from the whole. Technology is a medium that affects composition; it generates problems of scale, distance and touch. The space inside the shape of the canvas is a specific place, in the same way the world outside the frame is specific; this is context. These two places can sit adjacent and relate without one coming to depict the other. I grew up in Northern California and learned to paint landscapes. I still make observational drawings but they are not true to life, mostly they just look like grids.

Different kinds of objects help us to remember differently; memory is what pulls us forward in the future. In order to paint I have to let go of other things, to know also how to forget. An image of something is remote in that it can create too big of a gap in our consciousness between reality and fantasy. I hope that painting can be a way of un-knowing information in favor of something more first hand.