Square Deal: Abstract Paintings

I find making art is an dynamic process: from one moment to the next, one context to the next, one milieu to another, one medium to another. Shifting, changing, making the new and developing a personal language with a sense of grace. I like the end result to be multifaceted and encompass more than one way to reason. My works are not generally very available for compartmentalization. Some of them are abstract depictions. Some originate in fragments of my memory. Many or most originate in the unconscious. Some of them represent only their own form, emerging as 'poetics' of art making. In musical metaphor, then: geometry is gesture, movement is rhythm, harmony is resolution of dissonance and color is voice or instrument. Mood and emotions generated are: joy, tension, ebullience, anger, rage, sadness, blissful and more. Some of my works can be explored from normal viewing distance as well as from an intimate proximity to explore what they have to reveal. What is anticipated may be different than what will be discovered. As the distance shifts and details are revealed or muffled, then images, color fields, forms, textures and rhythms separate or coalesce in the fields of vision. Feelings generated continue to evolve. I like to create work where illusions are unstable and invite repeated explorations by the viewer. Initially, the works provoke a belief in a discovered image, emotion, rhythms and color harmonies. Look away and look again; there will be an entirely new and just as ambiguous structures and feelings. Additionally, the viewer will recreate my work by adapting it to personal frames of reference. The capacity of the work to co-opt existing expectations and be co-opted in return is the success of the work. A good painting is a conversation where emotions, time, space, process and the raw materials collide with the medium's illusionist possibilities. I believe it has less to do with managing the dialogue between materials and image. A blank canvas and tub of paint or a block of stone and chisels are nothing but materials, devoid of meaning. When I intervene and put them together, they emerge as a 'painting' or 'sculpture'. While they do exist on their own, they also become a point of departure for the viewer. In this book I am offering my small scale paintings. Painting, as drawing, is a primary activity. It is a very efficacious and enduring way to communicate. Infants draw and paint before acquiring language. 32,000 years ago the ancient inhabitants of the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in France demonstrated extraordinary communication capacity, leaving a legacy of fantastic art work on the interior surfaces of the cave that still evokes intense emotional responses. We as humans will continue to inhabit interiors and paintings will continue to grace our walls as extraordinarily efficient communication modalities. At present, we are much divided, limited in our ability to influence events and their effect on our expanded, globalized world. All this is occurring while we are seemingly at the height of connectedness through digitization, internet and the social media and more. My art making offers me a physical record of my psychic impulses, binding them intimately and enduringly. It offers me a sense of integrity and completeness in this complex and fragmented post-modern society.