Artist Statement
(Adapted from New Hampshire Manifesto: An artist statement in the form of a series of twelve tiny essays in April 2023.)
I subscribe to modernism as the understanding that visual quality is real, desirable, elusive, undefinable, and unattainable by formulas. I’m drawn to scenes, particularly of people, but I put them through the sieve of abstract composition and play with the components. I’m interested in highly systematic ways of depiction: Lawren Harris landscapes, the Rinpa school, Medieval mosaics from Europe and the Levant, comics. I am pro-decoration. There is nothing in art like a system employed with savvy affection.
I work with a palette of oxides of yellow, red, and black, the last which is my blue. Other colors come after, as subordinates. I like to be close to materials: I paint studies in egg tempera, refine my own linseed oil from flax oil, and sometimes mull oil topcoats from scratch. That said, I follow Matisse: “Rules have no existence outside of individuals.”
Zen regards reality as graspable, but not with the thinking mind, and describable, but not with thinking words. This so resembles how modernism regards quality that they must be talking about the same thing. Braque: “Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.” Yuan-Wu: “The thousand sages have not transmitted the single word before sound.” Clement Greenberg: “You ‘get it,’ you ‘intuit’ quality. But you can’t analyze it.” The Wu-Men Kuan on the Original Face: “You can’t picture it in words.” Reality is therefore quality? Yes. Genesis: “And God saw all that had been made, and found it very good.”