AN ARTIST STATEMENT

IN GENERAL

 

           I enjoy the job of being an artist, the work, building paintings, arranging the parts, the structure of it, juggling the visual and the conceptual, solving little problems and stumbling across ideas during the process.

 

           For me, it all simply boils down to making slightly odd and interesting things to look at, things which are halting and provoke a level of inquiry.  It is mostly no more complicated than that. Of course, there are specifics and complexities within each series but other than titles and from time to time and a few words, clarification just seems to deflate the work. Asking for more begins to feel closer to a confession being forced from you by the police. 

 

            I see my work gently provoking a thought in the viewer. It's not my job to tell people what to think, but rather, through something that is just a bit out of the ordinary show them perhaps the most interesting thing they have seen that day. Hopefully, they will walk away from the work curious.

 

           Over the course of many decades of painting and drawing, I have come to a few conclusions, one of which is that I have no use for thick, unintelligible, over cooked art theory and criticism and its application to painting and drawing. I don't trust a good deal of it anyhow, the product of dueling, bullying academics mostly, blustering on and on and getting caught up in minutia until they have eventually eviscerated the damned thing.

 

           I don’t try to make a point with my work and it means nothing. It just is! The French poet, Paul Valery once wrote: “A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.” I won’t allow my work to vanish into meaning. I’m a visual artist and as such my work leads to nonverbal places, places that will not slow to explanation.

 

           I paint because I love to paint. I draw because I love to draw. I do them both because they make me smarter and I believe being smart is better than being stupid.