STATEMENTS
"Once it has been separated from the owner, a child's school portrait loses its function as an interpersonal talisman, and becomes only an anonymous record of American life, an artifact of a misplaced moment. Each of my Unpainted Portraits starts with this kind of found photograph, which I then modify using collage, paint, re-photography and digital means. My modifications serve to embellish, obscure, celebrate, and destroy the underlying image.
"As a substrate for artistic elaboration, a photographic portrait is a canvas as blank as any other, bearing the perceptible weight of a certain history. In this way, the creation of these artworks is analogous to life itself, which is created from moment to moment in both the light and the shadow of one's personal and collective past.
"This series explores the creation of something new from something that is known, and finding something strangely familiar in the unfamiliar. It examines context as the wellspring of meaning, the nature of nostalgia, the merits of memory, and the character of human connectedness."
Salt Lake City, 2 April 2024
“My work is based on the proposition that a person might be able to select a piece of plastic, cardboard or whatever and, through the application of their own thought and effort, transform it into something that is interesting and perhaps even provocative to look at. The artworks in this series were created by arranging and reconfiguring discarded materials such as cardboard, paper, plastic, fabric, and metal, and then securing them in a fixed arrangement.
“Though the completed compositions are sometimes hardly distinguishable from any other accumulation of debris, the designation of these particular accumulations as works of art invites the viewer to evaluate the aesthetic merits of the selections that have been made, including the arrangement that has been imposed and the qualities of the garbage itself (its colors, textures, edges, accretions, greasiness, stickiness, state of decay, etc.). The work invites a consideration of attraction versus revulsion, waste versus efficiency, restraint versus indulgence, uniqueness versus mass production, the transformative capacity of art, the meaning of garbage, and coming face to face with one's own participation in a society that produces it in abundance.”
Salt Lake City, 20 March 2020
“My current preferred term for my work is ‘hand-calculated non-representational painting.’ While embracing the handmade mark, pattern, and indulgent color, I place strict limitations on the deployment of these means. The intended length, width, placement, and color of each brushstroke are carefully planned. As each painting develops, very limited allowance is possible for improvisation, experimentation, or revisions. The act of painting is the literal subject of the resulting image, and the making of each painting becomes itself the metaphor for the viewer's consideration. The work examines the act of imposing order, and the role played by this impulse in constructing meaning. In my mind, the act of painting is a political exercise: Although it is a private act, it yields an object intended for public examination.
“My work extends a dialog familiar in the work of Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Bridget Riley, Gene Davis, and others. As in these precursors, a palpable undercurrent of optimism threatens to reduce the work to a merely sentimental exercise, but that is not far from the point. In Reinhardt's words ‘someday the monotonous and ugly spaces you live and work in will be organized... as intelligently and as beautifully as the spaces have been in some paintings. A painting of quality is a challenge to disorder and insensitivity everywhere.’ *
“My paintings are informed by a parallel body of diminutive mixed media works. Here the planning and ordering found in my paintings is transmuted into a process of selecting, responding, and reconfiguring. In relying upon found materials, these candy-colored constructions assume themes of commerce, consumption, and waste.”
New York, 26 September 2012
* Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Space, editorial cartoon published in PM, April 28, 1946.
“Late one evening in January, I watched the city speed by through the window of a taxi. I saw the million passing colors of the urban landscape compress into a single vision, framed by the deep night sky and a darkly patinated Ford interior. It was an image of wholeness, composed of limitless retinal possibilities.
“Over the past several years, I have been working with pre-existing color palettes, harvesting component colors for my images from found materials, often from the city's garbage. Rather than working directly with those materials, this series draws from a complete visual experience, and marks a return for me to the use of paint. These paintings do not seek to simulate specific colors, but to establish a set of parameters that includes them all.
“These paintings seek to recreate a palette that extends beyond a caricature of color, and like the image of the passing city, form an essay on what it is like to have eyes in the world.”
New York, 17 October 2007
“Imagine two people sitting across a table from each other. One slides an object across the table to the other, presenting it for the other's appraisal. Words, if spoken, are unnecessary, ‘Look at this,’ or, ‘Hey, this is worth looking at.’ To me, this is the basic human interaction that we call visual art.
“I think my job as an artist is to make personal endorsements, take a stand for something, and attach my name to the declaration of significance for an object. In this way, my work is an exercise, and a celebration, of individual responsibility.
“Living in New York City includes doing a lot of walking. I also do a lot of looking and a lot of what I see is garbage. Cardboard is not beautiful to me, and whatever cardboard means, the efficiency it embodies, the purposes that it serves, is not really transcendent to me. What is meaningful to me is the idea that someone can take a piece of cardboard and through the application of their own energy and by putting their own name behind it, can make it into something that is interesting to look at.”
New York, 10 February 2006
What Art Is
Introduction
The primary artistic gesture is to designate something as art, to point to that which is important. This essential statement, ‘this is art, this is meaningful,’ is indistinguishable from, ‘art is this, this is what art is.’ I see my work as framing a specific definition of art, which, I believe, functions to imply an entire configuration of values. By positioning itself, the work invites viewers to reevaluate their own value system in relation to it.
My work defines itself against the vacuous values of consumer society. Rather than addressing the specifics of particular products or markets, allusions in my work are most clearly understood as references to underlying value systems. I think of each piece as a case study, a unique visual contemplation of contrasting values.
The vocabulary of the work is drawn from recognizable artistic modes as well as commercial imagery such as food and fashion. I see the present and history of art, culture and commerce as an open catalogue of possibilities. My work results from a process of intuitively combining these different images until something resonant emerges.
Art and Imitation (or A Little Constructive Criticism)
Art takes a stand, it challenges you, it might even slap you in the face. Artists assert personal visions - meaning they label their decisions with their own names. Art then, is a celebration of individual responsibility. The best artists affirm the possible, the poetic, and the profound.
Imitation is attractive. It sweet talks you, and flatters your good taste. Imitation decorates, advocating of the status quo by making attractive what already is. Imitation is comforting, reassuringly reflecting your world as you want to believe that it is. Imitation offers no new possibilities. There are no latent implications within its seduction. Its appeal is shallow, with a positivity that tends to flatten anything in its path. It creates two-dimensionality and depthlessness.
Art functions as a corrective for imitation, teaching the eyes to distinguish between the two. Frosted Geometric Abstraction (oil on canvas, 2004) is a small painting conceived as a chromatic and textural simulation of a sugar cookie. This small painting finds its identity in opposition to imitation, particularly in opposition to morsels that masquerade as works of art, when they are more like exercises in empty calories.
Art and Politics
Art is not only about something, it is about something meaningful. An artwork’s meaningfulness begins with its importance to the artist, whose urgency, passion, and sincerity --without arbitrariness, narcissism or sentimentality-- leaves a perceptible imprint.
The experience of art is an interaction between the viewer and the artist. Whether the artwork functions as the artist’s surrogate, wake, or messenger, the viewer’s experience is ultimately interpersonal. Art, in its varied forms, constitutes the vital intersection of the social and the personal, the political and the profound.
Sex and the City (concrete, wood, and oil, 2005) is a small block of concrete slathered in pink paint, its rough wooden form serving as a frame. Concrete is used to refer to the ideals that inspire its use: efficiency, usefulness, and compromise. Pink oil paint is the counterpoint, asserting the fleshy, ethereal, and poetic in the space of the cold, solid, and lifeless.
Fact and Fiction
Fiction painting operates by illusion. It tells stories, expresses moods, and creates imaginary spaces. Fiction painting addresses the question, ‘What does it look like?’ Fact painting constructs meaning through the way it is put together. With fact painting the question is, ‘Why would somebody do that?’ Perhaps all painting has elements of both fact and fiction, but I think of my work as fact painting.
Raw canvas, visible ground, and exposed nail heads in my work draw attention to the process of making oil paintings, foregrounding its deliberateness. I want the work to be openly purposeful, made to be looked at. I intend my painting process to be completely transparent. I want viewers to see how the paint was applied, to know what they are looking at.
Faux Formica (oil on canvas, 2005) is a small square painting simulating wood grain. As a mimetic artwork, this painting invites judgment against its external referent, either wood or plastic laminate as hinted by the title. But the title is unclear, and may be understood to refer to either the painting as an imitation of laminate, to laminate as an imitation of wood, or to wood as an imitation of laminate. The work addresses the nature of illusion, and the complexity of searching for something original in a context of fiction and illusion.
The Fashioning of Art
The word fashion can refer both to forces within art, and to some of the most subtle imitations of art. A fashion is a style or trend, normally in clothing. Fashion changes. The parade of changing styles in art history might be compared to a succession of fashions. Fashion also means fashionable: stylish, attractive, tasteful, or conforming to a trend. Participation in the cutting-edge of fashion means having the newest, most obnoxious clothing available, making the continual replacement of the products of fashion intrinsic to their function. Fashion must be new, which is the same thing as being instantly out-dated.
Geometric Abstraction with Tweed (oil on canvas, 2005) is a double-dichromatic square, divided in two. The left side roughly approximates this currently fashionable fabric, and the right offers a reinterpretation of the familiar pattern. The painting promotes an idea for tweed, and frames an investigation of the artist as fashion designer.
Art and Fashion
Fashion as a commodity can be considered anti-art. Far removed from merely meeting the human need for clothing, fashion’s purpose is to gratify personal vanity and promote social distinction. Fashion is the materialization of ideals such as appearance, self-absorption, and conspicuous consumption. Fashion reinforces one’s ideas about self and the world, pandering to the craving for acceptance and power. Where art celebrates the connectedness of individuals, fashion homogenizes the crowd into fleshless corporations of sellers and uniformed hordes of buyers.
Abstract Painting with Houndstooth (oil on canvas, 2005) is a fundamentally abstract painting, a mode associated with the spiritual, or the purportedly spiritual. The houndstooth pattern quotes a currently fashionable weave. A generalized gestural brushstroke interrupts the matrix, invoking the rhetoric of the spiritual upon the anti-ideals of commerce and the fashionable.
Art and the Market
Art is free. Unlike businesses, artists do not respond to demand, they make things whether people want them or not. Art is an unavoidably awkward combatant in the arena of buying and selling because it is already paid for, the artist having donated labor and materials. So-called buyers are actually endorsing ideas and enabling artists, rather than simply acquiring objects.
Flesh and Blood in Herringbone (acrylic on canvas, 2005) is a geometric abstraction based on a common woven pattern, in warm, bodily colors. The painting is about warmth and coldness in visual, interpersonal and economic terms.
Conflict Resolution
Meaning is under continual attack. King, corporation, superficiality and stupidity conspire to replace life with entertainment, understanding with information, and identity with apathy. Art is about meaning. Ultimately meaning is restored by cultivating profound connections to other people, to nature, and to eternity.
City Love (mixed media on panel, 2005) consists of two small square panels, hung close together on a wall, faced with rough concrete. The close physical proximity and visual similarity of the two panels links them as a pair. They are not identical, but their differences seem insignificant. They have been raised from horizontal --the orientation in which concrete must be applied-- and elevated together on the wall, where they lose their resemblance to pavers, where they cannot be put to use or walked on.
New York, 10 June 2005