One of the forms that my work takes is that of an imprint or a tracing. 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 I began to draw. I learned from how-to books to draw things systematically, like a head or a horse. 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. Pictures can guide the eye to what is important. 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 through other artists. People bring their own meanings to things.
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. 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 hope my work sits somewhere between abstraction and picture making. Abstract in the sense the sense that they are process based and generate meaning this way, and pictures in the sense that they are fragments. 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. 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.