Over the past twenty years of teaching, ten of them at Hampshire,
I have found myself in the company of others who believe that art
matters, and the struggle to forge, speak, write about, and act on
one's beliefs has been an enriching one.
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Over the past nine years the experiences in my studio and home in
Holyoke have reminded me that the need to find beauty in daily
experience is deeply ingrained, and a need still shared by many.
My neighbors and I plant flowers and fill the air with music, and
increasingly, I give myself permission to celebrate the simple
image of sunlight striking glass and brick. It has not fallen to
me to more directly record urban imagery or attempt to rectify
social inequities through my art, and yet it is important that I
live and work where I do and that the images and ideas I address
take as their starting point the conventional and the poetic.
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Although this work is firmly rooted in 19th century concerns, I
hope it is also apparent that it employs Modernist precepts. I am
interested in reconsidering and reconfiguring both. The search for
meaning has never been more complex and more interesting than it
is in the present, when every choice can be seen as a form of
exclusion, or when the machinery of unenlightened government has
been enlisted to silence art (whether by means of censorship,
lawsuits or refusal to fund the arts). Art informs both our
senses and our minds, and no matter what the final form takes, we
are the better for it, uneasiness and discomfort included.
Although my own work will offend few (except on grounds of failure
to provide postmodernist critiques on the one hand and failure to
adhere to the tenets of realism on the other) it requires an
engagement which goes beyond a superficial reading and
recognition; it denies overly romantic readings as well as
formalist ones.
I exhibit this survey of the past six years in the hope that the
work appeals to the senses and to the mind of the interested
observer.
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SUPPLEMENT TO LOOKING
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This exhibition marks my tenth year at Hampshire. I have selected
work from the past six years, some of which has been seen on
campus in group shows, and in NY in a one person show.
I love to paint, to look at paintings, to think about paintings.
Here is a sort of field guide to the work I do.
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PLACE
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These are studio paintings.
For the past nine years I have worked from the same two windows in
my studio in Holyoke. One window has a white sheer curtain and a
window shade. The other has Venetian blinds. Both have screens,
storm windows and interior frames with thermal pane set in brown
aluminum frames. All of the window glass layers have become dusty.
Outside the studio windows I look down three stories onto a
parking lot and a row of businesses. There is a tree directly
outside of the windows, and a brick wing that extends out at 90
degrees.
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PROCEDURE
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The studio faces east and I observe the morning and early
afternoon sunlight which hits the windows. All of the paintings
are about that light. Every day that I am in the studio I am
working against time, racing against the moment when the sun will
be blocked by the building, and no longer rake across my view.
Although I paint what I see, there is little evidence of the
particulars of the urban landscape or of the natural elements
outside the window. There is no attention to the interior space,
beyond examining the folds of a curtain or the interior plane of
the window bar.
The dusty panes and curtain folds form a screen on which the
sunlight interlocks with shadow. The sunlight is opaque, bright
and full of colors: blue, or maybe sienna, rarely white or yellow.
The shadows are places the eye can penetrate and find rich color
and a deeper space. The shadows fall on the glass from the window
bar and from the branches outside in multiple repeating patterns.
This is a threshold space, where visual and spatial logic get made
over in another form. Geometry collapses; the shallow field
becomes an arena for heightened response. Light and space become
transformed, then become transforming. The subject is not the
window. The desire for recognizability and stability is only
partially satisfied. The tradition of the painter simultaneously
delivering and refusing to grant pleasure is served. The roots of
painterly representation are reexplored.
The works are nearly always paired. One image does not tell the
story, which is a story of change. Windows open and close. Time
passes. The seasons change. The gaze shifts. Patterns emerge and
dissolve. Light clarifies. Light obscures.
Modernist attention to edge, scale, surface, and space is evident.
These concerns are at least as evident as what I am observing, and
why.
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PRECEDENTS
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I appreciate the rigorous and idiosyncratic approach to seeing
exemplified by Cezanne and Morandi. I owe a huge debt to Edward
Hopper, whose paintings taught me that light could be a subject. I
am stunned to find that without my intending it, the new work has
gravitated toward Monet's work in tutoring us about depth of field
and painterly gesture. I am affected by the serial forms and
attention to specific formal issues of Donald Judd. I find in
contemporary art that it is not possible or desirable to have
mentors, but I feel grateful to the artists who embrace painterly
painting and/or imagery as legitimate and exciting, particularly
when it is tied to making meaning.
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DICHOTOMIES
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The images are made to be understood visually but an uninformed
viewer will not be able to sort them out.
The work is full of ideas but not language based ideas.
These paintings are directly related to daily experience of common
architectural elements, but these are nearly undecipherable
because they become nearly unrecognizable under the pressure of
scrutiny.
Painterliness and poetic response vie with austere scale and
strict pairing.
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WRITING
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Finally, many artists feel compelled to write and speak about
their work, out of a sense that they are by necessity the best and
the only critic for the work they do. Others refuse the burden, I
think out of a sense of responsibility for the capacity of a
silent thing to act forcibly upon a viewer. Nothing should stand
in the way of a realization which makes the hair stand up on your
neck. Fencing in the power of a visual work of art by containing
it in the safe pasturelands of written directives is an act no
artist willingly commits, nor does a good critical writer.
The guides I've given are as true and as clear as I can make them,
but they are only a part of what I think about. I wrote in the
studio, in front of the work and the windows, and yet it is not a
complete or satisfying survey of making or meaning. If only a part
of what matters is in the writing, all of it is in the actual
work, and it is there I encourage you to spend time, allow for
doubt, search for clarity. Give them the test: watch one piece for
at least an hour, and then see what you can see.
back to the oil paintings
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