I’ve seriously considered painting a burden, though I do consider it my only means of understanding the world, and, in fact my only means of feeling at home in the world. I don’t know what I feel and think until I paint. Painting is my only means of bringing each day about – making peace with myself and creating a place in which I fit into. I try to turn my external environment into an inward reality – it’s one of the things that makes me – it takes from me and it gives to me.

The human figure is the vehicle with which I can most positively relate. I’m preoccupied, fascinated and curious about the solitariness and mysteriousness of human beings. The more developed my curiosity becomes, the more acute, the more complicated, complex and suggestive the world around people becomes.

I am also driven and guided by sensory impressions: noise, color, texture, smell, shapes, expressions, tone, language and light.
I don’t approach the canvas with a particular image in my mind. I go to it with pigment in my hands and do something to that piece of material in front of me, then work almost at random until the image begins to assert itself. This action depends on the imponderable and I welcome the accidental – it creates and arena in which to act. The questions that I always ask are: what do you want to be, what do you want from me and what do you want me to do. Sometimes the painting becomes the answer – in other words, I am not trying to prove anything. I am the one who is learning.

Every time I pick up stretcher bars at my framers’ workshop I always ask to go to the back room. It is a windowless, narrow, dingy room filled with ready-made panels from scrap wood, mishaps of some sort or somebody else’s mistake. I always pick odd sizes in the hope that they will challenge me, force me to look at surface and space differently. How am I going to deal with this?

On one such occasion I found several small 5 x 4 x 2.5 inch boxes, bought them, put them in a grocery bag and left them in the storage area of my studio. A few days later I woke from a dream with the number fifty-two spinning in my head. Strangely enough, I don’t remember anything else about that dream. Apart from being the number in a standard deck of playing cards, I still don’t know why fifty-two happened to be in my dream. Nonetheless, as soon as I got up I called my framer and ordered fifty-two 5 x 4 inch boxes. Three weeks later I stacked two more shopping bags full of them into the back of my studio. And there they stayed for over a year. I moved the boxes from one place to another every so often, always feeling slightly guilty that I had not done anything with them.

Some months after I purchased these panels, I made my first trip to India. The diversity and clamor of the experience sideswiped me. Nothing was ever the way I expected it to be. The only thing to expect was the unexpected, which came in many forms and always wanted to sit right next to me. I was privileged to experience a vastly complex culture that begs one to surrender to innocence, sweetness, beauty, sensuality, color, and immeasurable generosity. I came away from India deeply moved and my experience continues to affect me, as a person and as a painter.

Its’ dense population left me wondering how I could portray the individual soul as one among many, singling out uniqueness from among a vast whole. The Standard Pack, fifty-two small paintings, is an attempt to make portraits. Although nameless, these people are revealed as individuals, regardless of where they are or their background.

The paintings were all done at night, away from the studio. I worked in my living room, sitting on my favorite chair, with a pillow on my lap and I tried to let myself go. I care about connecting with people. If only for brief moments, I try to connect on a meaningful level, on a gut level.

I paint. I pursue it relentlessly, with urgency, soul, heart, and intensity. I give shape to breath, to length, to thickness and space. I begin from the outside, then work the painting to create an inside. An echoing forward, an echoing backward: elasticity. That is really what the paintings are about. A ripening, a deepening, a movement closer to my vision. A tracing of moments of existence.

In my previous body of work, Paths in the shadow-break,I painted shrouded, lone figures and sought to convey both a sense of weight in the world and also a certain lightness. The figure is stripped to its most essential elements. An averted back, a twist of the torso, a leaning or holding of the shoulder or head — just the slightest sense of a figure’s movement to make the mood understood.

In the current Monk series, I allow the figures to look forward and emerge from an uncluttered field, suspended yet anchored to the edge or close to the edge of the canvas. Directly facing the viewer, the figures reveal their minds and psyches. I make just a few marks to indicate facial expressions; sometimes creating them with the end of my brush, at other times by rubbing or removing paint with my hands. I try to capture, expand and crystallize the range, depth and complexity of emotions. And I find here, in this outward and inward landscape, much of a force towards a truth determined to stand firm in what is human.

return to top