VERY EARLY
An art without image was my idea of art when I first started out. I wanted my painting independent of likeness, autonomous, devoid of all connotations and associations which resemblance brings.
EARLY
My early paintings were informed by an American and European modernist aesthetic. I counted Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove as my influences for their naturalistic and landscape elements, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, for his brooding expressionism achieved through his dense application of paint. I learned from Joan Miro and from the Color Field painters, particularly Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski, how to make paintings that were large, manifestly ambitious, yet also appeared physically light.
EIGHTIES
By the early eighties, I had become more interested in expressing force and aggression by foregrounding the physical, material qualities of paint. I resumed working in oils. The paint became heavier and thicker. Technical aspects of Willem de Kooning's work from the '50's served as a model. I became increasingly involved in the phenomenology of figuration in painting. My canvases enacted the drama of nascent, almost recognizable forms struggling to come into being, only to recede once again into abstraction. Philip Guston's transitional work of the late 1950's and early '60's provided a source of inspiration during this period, as did Alberto Giacometti's painting and sculpture. Under the influence of the Mayan ruins and the Yucatán, my palette heated up.
In the late eighties, hanging out with the painter Joan Mitchell and visiting Romanesque architecture broadened my view of what a painting could be. Monumental structures that position the human subject in relation to the cosmos became an important source of consideration for my work. The Acropolis, El Alcazar de los Reyes Christianos de Cordoba, Moissac, and St. Severin, all gave me the sense of art as something vast that yet remained in touch with the fundamental human impulse to navigate the world in order to find a place of physical, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment.
During the 1980's, painting had come under attack from postmodern critics for being conservative and outmoded. In the 1990's, abstraction in painting was largely discredited in feminist circles as a bastion of male privilege. I reaffirmed my commitment to articulating a position asserted this powerful tradition as a viable form of expression for myself and others.
Unlike photography, painting does not derive from modern, utilitarian practices but grows out of older forms of visual expression connected to the realm of the spirit. The act of painting connotes a belief in the value of individual, personal, subjective experience. It honors and perpetuates the most basic of humanist values. The assertion of a transcendent sublime by American modernist painting has long been in retreat yet painting, as a medium and as a history, remains linked to a belief in the redemptive possibilities of the human imagination and the importance of freedom.
NINETIES
In 1992 I needed to function in two studios – Chicago and New York. Part of the deal with the Chicago studio was that the floor be kept clean. A friend had suggested that beginning a painting with all the artifacts of past paintings visible – as my floor usually was – might be consistent with my thinking and making procedures, and challenge them too. I thought this was brilliant, and that it would give me a jump on the next group of paintings. I had a show coming up and I wanted as much as possible to choose from for it. Consequently, I sized drop cloths that I then used on the floor of the Chicago studio and at the end of my time there, I sent the drop cloths back to New York. Making paintings out of something that base and trampled was a challenge, yet after I overcame my initial difficulties, the procedure opened up possibilities. Eventually, the drop cloths became paintings.
In the nineties my approach became more resolutely one of inclusiveness – in visuality, and in my use of materials. I felt that the standard painting studio materials – pristine tubes of oil paint, appropriate mediums and solvents – were not giving me enough to re-collect in my work what I had experienced sensually in living. Witnessing women and men living, becoming sick, dying on the streets in New York and other American cities, I felt that I was witnessing the decay of our society – of any idea of a society. I wanted to make paintings that would study and grapple with uncontrollable forces and the messiness of the human environment, rather than remain within the safety of the minimal or the known limits of the pure. Disorder, irresolution, unfinished space — these aspects of nature and the uncontrolled side-effects of our culture's material abundance are horrible and fascinating. There is a sort of raw truth in these things that led me toward an art that is both opulent and gritty and invites conflict.
I began to add elements from the earth, crushed graphite, copper, marble dust, aluminum, iron oxide, and mundane urban elements including scraps, trash, studio debris — among other things. Their referent and optical qualities intrigued me. My interest in heterogeneity (rather than formal unity) expanded. I relied on pours and chemical processes, such as the oxidation of copper, to produce a series of contrasts between areas of luminous color and bleak dullness. I then intervened with some of the pours to make them less continuous and graceful. At times I initiated new chemical processes that affected portions of the canvas at different rates and in starts and stops. Some of these works possess a certain gritty beauty, many are decidedly unpretty paintings.
By the mid 1990's, I had become proficient in the full range of techniques I had been using and I began working on developing new marking systems that I applied to found objects, mostly exposed x ray films. On exposed x-ray films taken of those who had died of AIDS, I intervened with chemicals and color, at times to transform the image of the diseased parts, at times as an intuitive response to them. The altered x rays are elegies for the dead that lament the loss of the human touch. My transformations of the exposed x ray film seek to restore that touch in full knowledge that this is not possible. (I continue to make altered x rays and they will be included in my exhibition in June 2011 at the Field Institute at Insel Hombroich, Neuss.)
Also in the nineties, I began to draw and photograph my immediate surroundings as a form of visual note-taking, attempting to ground myself in places and cultures. My drawings, photographs, and altered x rays record directly and spontaneously my responses to lived experience. They annotate and comment upon places and events in my life in such a way as to affirm my quotidian existence -- those aspects of my daily life that I would otherwise forget or neglect. They reflect directly and improvisationally my social and personal engagements with contemporary life.
By the late nineties, this ancillary body of work had begun to contribute to my paintings in that they allowed for elements of contingency, flux and indeterminacy to inform my practice. I began to remove the virtuosic from my painting, working relentlessly on the small paintings, working and reworking the surface with brush and palette knife. Some of the small paintings became, for me, the embodiment of destructive violence, harnessed and transformed by the act of painting. The larger more open paintings refer frequently to uncharted spaces such as those one finds between airports and cities, that are neither industrial, urban, nor suburban, but rather constitute dead zones of topography. I link the oasis of neglect and no purpose with useless, "wasted" time. Uncharted space and "wasted" time are vital. They permit us more human and perhaps then more humane ways of feeling and being.
In our age, painting has become a contradiction to and form of resistance against an information age based on digital technology. Painting fosters a way of seeing that rewards stillness and slowness. A prolonged, meditative engagement is required. Although the compelling immediacies and contingencies communicated by the electronic media are ever present and may thus become the subject for painting, the act of experiencing a painting offers the self, maker and viewer alike, a form of inter-subjective connectedness to the world that remains an indispensable pleasure and value.
I feel more clearly than ever that my work derives inspiration from culture within nature (as with the architecture at Insel Hombroich, as in the neighborhoods of my various studios in New York) and during the past year I began paintings with that attitude specifically. These works, with which I am now engaged, refer as well to the decipherment of Linear B script. I have begun re-reading the account of the trajectory of that discovery that I had read many years before, The Decipherment of Linear B, by John Chadwick. During the process of decipherment, the arbitrary assignation of meaning for the purpose of defining a sign resulted in false translation. This notion has always interested me.
My recent paintings are mediations on actual artifacts – often the syllabary, logograms and pictograms of Linear B script. They are done on paper and linen with water base paint, raw pigment (as referent to clay tablets and excavation), and at times oil. During the process of their making, the sense of meaning is displaced by a shift to immaterial information, paralleling the working attempts at the decipherment of Linear B script itself. The paintings develop out of acts and erasures, through form and its displacement. Lacunae become image. Through erasure, displacement, and fracture a new image is constructed. Each painting refracts a proposal that is transitory.