Some Thoughts On Painting

My ideas for paintings emerge organically from the process of their making. Painting is a continuum and the plasticity of the medium is its beauty; it can be anything, which continues to evolve and fascinate the more that I see. We are altered in some way by what we see. Affecting the cells and chemistry of our bodies, images flare internally and externally feeding our hungering brains in a constant flow. Our pupils dilate as our eyes absorb images, we may feel our heart race and our desire shapes what we see. Color elicits a tasty reaction in the back of the throat that originates in the gut - Painting begins in the body. I begin with a black ground, a deep space, an unsteady void, within which I make something from mounds of seemingly inert and innocuous, yet culturally loaded goo. The beautiful and ugly, the imaginary and mundane comingle as I work with various paint mediums and exploit their inherent differences. I am a sucker for the space that develops at an early stage of the painting and I lose myself to the sensations of material. However unsatisfied with the ease of execution, I then let the painting sit for some time and with distance it becomes less precious and more of a “thing.” I can then see the painting objectively, and an irreverent, animated color and deviant, bulbous,figuration blooms from the morass to subvert and mock, but also expand my initial experience. I’ve found that a steady diet of paintings and cartoons are where everything and absolutely - nothing - at - all may happen and when they digest somehow acknowledge the humor, ambiguity and futility of now. Painting is ripe with comedy and contradiction; it is an unstable process that reveals as much as it conceals, which always leaves me guessing and wanting more.