Slippery Machines

My paintings recently arrived at a point where the ideas I was working with could no longer be related only as images. The ideas also did not succeed as exclusively written forms, works that I made using only words. In early 2007, I attended a lecture by architect Thom Mayne, whose buildings are often the result of finding the connections that make extremely disparate ideas, forms and systems cohere into a larger whole. Inspired in part by this direction, I decided to force the words and images together, and let the work become the process of negotiating the interplay between the two.

I am primarily interested in narrative ideas concerning dynamic contrast, struggle, and conflict, because I feel that every human being faces dangerous/difficult parts of their existence that demand both attention and action. My work therefore gravitates towards situations and themes that are unsettled, skewed, shifted, and/or damaged. These are usually complicated subjects that cannot be explained simply (e.g. destruction, desire, or despair); they do not fit neatly into ideals or ideologies, so describing them requires considering numerous elements and viewpoints, expressed in images, words, and paint. The process of integrating those disparate parts into a single painting creates gaps and contradictions, and further generates points of tension and mystery. By exploring those points, I hope to find some type of truth.

I do not see the text in these paintings as either captions or descriptions in service of the image. The words begin as discrete, separate ideas, and as the painting develops, the text becomes a fully painted element, worked and reworked in the same physical manner as the rest of the painting. Like a poet working with concrete forms, I consider both the “content weight” of the words (how the eye and brain read them like normal text), and their graphic qualities as design elements.

Though I use representational images as subject matter, I do not seek to mimic or re-create observed reality. The physical immediacy of oil paint keeps becoming more pronounced in my work, and I use the paint to create a complex surface: one in which transparent, semi-opaque, opaque, and impasto passages accumulate to suggest a pictorial space, but also leave visible evidence of a working process.

Several years ago I began making still life paintings using a square canvas turned 45 degrees off of vertical true-- a “diamond” shape. This simple adjustment to the format generated a wonderful array of new compositional elements; shapes that would normally be overlooked as “background” were reconfigured into jagged, irregular, energetic components that drew the eye to all parts of the canvas. In 2007 I decided to try this tactic with my narrative paintings, composing with rectangular canvases rotated away from vertical & horizontal true. The results were similar, but even more profound. The compositional energy was also increased, but additionally the altered cropping of the narrative images implied missing pieces just outside the boundaries of the frame, parts of time and space that were frozen in a state of perpetually coming into being (or perhaps perpetually falling away).