Introduction
I prefer that my art works be interacted with – with a minimum of interference on my part. My thoughts and feelings about them are important for me, but not necessarily to viewers interacting with the work itself. Knowledge of my point of view may sometimes hinder a fresh approach. My desire is that viewers come to the work as directly as possible and fully in their own experience. The art works are a meeting place between you the viewer, and myself. It is through the works that we relate to each other in new ways. By this process they take on meaning and value. Beyond this intention, they are merely objects.
So, it is suggested that visitors to this site first look at the work, and then return to this page as curiosity dictates. In the event that textual explication of my intentions is desirable, I offer the following on some issues I am engaged with:
Statement
Regardless of media, my work is an inquiry into dilemmas of being in time and space. In two-dimensional media, these dilemmas play out as dramatic interactions between myself and the materials of making, within or upon a planar limit.
My paintings, drawings, photographs and videos together with my dance performances articulate my experience of space, time, physicality and the immaterial.
The work of art is dynamic, the locus of directed awareness between ‘artist’ and audience. Its status as art object is predicated on its inseparability from the artist, the audience and the site of presentation or performance. The dynamic alignment of these three elements may illicit heightened experiential phenomena, which I characterize as sacred space.
Physical Visuality
A special attunement to the physical processes involved in making a picture gradually emerged after I started to dance. Over the years, I began to consider my paintings as more or less flat records of multidimensional psychic and physical events. Each image is a marker, a visual moment compressed upon a two-dimensional theater of action: a record of embodied states of being along a continuum of time. Every drawn or painted mark has a spatial tratectory and its imprint on the picture plane is a perfect transfer of the embodied history with which it originates. Paintings and drawings as much as works of film or video have kinesthetic histories, and elicit kinesthetic responses which may be subtle, but which ultimately cannot be separated from the viewer’s visual experience.
On Series
Over the course of my career, a number of thematic frameworks have emerged, providing me with strategies that facilitate inquiry into specific questions of form and subject. From relatively open-ended explorations, series emerge which reflect subsets of concerns through which formal properties and subject matter coalesce. These coalescences are more or less systematic explorations; calibrated variations within particular thematic circumstances. Some series reflect concerns of a particular moment. Once completed, they are not returned to. It is not unusual, however, that I will return to a series over time. In the case of some still lifes and iconographic studies for example, I have intermitently returned to themes first proposed early in my career. Whether or not a series is a unique set within my body of work or an ongoing inquiry, I accept and find useful, the implications of development.
On Development
Development takes place within particular series, across series as they arise chronologically, and over the course of my career taken as a whole. I consider all of my work, regardless of medium, as a single series in the sense that my basic concerns have remained consistent over time and across media and that there is some evolution.
On Essence
For me, progression is from description to essence. Strictly speaking, this progression is not linear. Although the observed tendency is movement in the direction of essence, there is often a flow between extremes of description, which is more superficial, and essence, which is more elemental. Description, or the surface of things, can coexist with essence in the same work. Although it is perhaps a temptation to rank them hierarchically, in my view they correspond only to different aspects or levels of phenomena. This impulse to move from the descriptive to the essential, the surface to the interior, underlies the searching imperative of the work, whether in the making of a single object or in a series or the entire body.
Progression is observed as a continuum along relations/poles/juxtapositions according to various dimensions. For example:
- spiritual: self/universal;
- material: physical/immaterial, form/void;
- spatial: surface/interior, flatness/volume;
- experiential: sensory/perceptual;
- quantitative: multiplicity/singularity; and
- embodiment: dualistic/integrative.
These characteristics, relationships and polarities consistently arise in the working process. They are not an intellectually arrived at framework. Nor are they rigidly in force. I perceive them as general tendencies only, and in the examples above, movement is not strictly from left to right. Nor is there a specific value, qualitatively, which favors one end of any continuum. Rather, progression relates to the achievement of greater clarity of expression regardless of position along a specific dimensional continuum. Ultimately, for me, essence is that experience which is most directly lived, or embodied. It is in and of the present and does not refer to any other phenomena. The problem of essence is not material in the sense that it can be located spatially. Therefore, surface can be equally essential as interior, depending upon circumstantial conditions. Likewise superficiality is not the same as complexity nor is simplicity the same as essentiality; a point of confusion in some readings of the modernist narrative or the development of contemporary art.
On Figuration and Abstraction
Generally speaking, I find distinctions between such terms as figurative/non-figurative, objective/non-objective and representational/abstract in descriptions of works of art to be artificial or at best conceptually imprecise. That I employ them in some circumstances is to acknowledge that they have somehow become common currency, and there exclusion would only heighten confusion.
On Iconography
My occasional explorations of Western, specifically Christian iconographic themes reflect a deeply felt engagement with my own art historical inheritance. They should not be construed as indicative of my religious views. Themes such as the Annunciation and Crucifixion, to which I have repeatedly returned, provide interfaces of form and subject which I find both metaphorically and formally compelling. The thousands of images (and texts) over many hundreds of years demonstrative of these themes (and others), are present in my creative awareness and have to a great degree shaped my artistic identity. These influence are more or less explicit.