Jesse Green, in New York Magazine (November 21, 2010) stated, "Art is not a product whose manufacture can be rationalized. Art is what you can't even see until you make it," which typifies my approach to artmaking.
Often, I don't know what a finished painting will look like, which I think is less a lack of foresight than being excited about discovering form. Even though each artwork is confined to the parameters of applying paint to a support, I try to approach each piece individually. Even if they look similar, chances are that the path to get there was wildly different. The resulting paintings are the residue resulting from a series of questions and responses encountered along the path of creating, rather than a fixed solution.
I make paintings that are process-based, meaning that the final image is arrived at through a series of technical and theoretical approaches.. Most of these fail. I keep failing until I realize that one of them is right. It’s kind of like trying to find the answer to a question that keeps changing.
The paintings are haunted by the persistent specter of high modernism—meaning that they fight between an insistence on surface and materials vs. narrative and illusion. They are usually self-aware and embedded in the history of painting. My Scandinavian and Northern European heritage has its own rich tradition of abstraction and symbolic use, but I rarely focus on culturally specific expressions, preferring instead an abstraction drawn from the everyday that is counter to its spiritual, ideal, and utopian origins. Instead, I borrow found marks, materials, signifiers (road signs, keyboard symbols, emojis, and packaging material), systems, structures, and philosophies such as geometry, theoretical mathematics, and optical illusions. My interest in vernacular abstraction and everyday symbolic use has led to language-based abstractions--collected texts that include idioms, platitudes, palindromes, and other word play, as well as a series of collaborative, narrative paintings that incorporate text, circus paintings made alongside my children.
I like the resolved image to point toward the things that are mystical, theoretical or conceptual. I hate to quote Picasso, but he said, “Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires,” which I think pretty much sums it up.
Often, I don't know what a finished painting will look like, which I think is less a lack of foresight than being excited about discovering form. Even though each artwork is confined to the parameters of applying paint to a support, I try to approach each piece individually. Even if they look similar, chances are that the path to get there was wildly different. The resulting paintings are the residue resulting from a series of questions and responses encountered along the path of creating, rather than a fixed solution.
I make paintings that are process-based, meaning that the final image is arrived at through a series of technical and theoretical approaches.. Most of these fail. I keep failing until I realize that one of them is right. It’s kind of like trying to find the answer to a question that keeps changing.
The paintings are haunted by the persistent specter of high modernism—meaning that they fight between an insistence on surface and materials vs. narrative and illusion. They are usually self-aware and embedded in the history of painting. My Scandinavian and Northern European heritage has its own rich tradition of abstraction and symbolic use, but I rarely focus on culturally specific expressions, preferring instead an abstraction drawn from the everyday that is counter to its spiritual, ideal, and utopian origins. Instead, I borrow found marks, materials, signifiers (road signs, keyboard symbols, emojis, and packaging material), systems, structures, and philosophies such as geometry, theoretical mathematics, and optical illusions. My interest in vernacular abstraction and everyday symbolic use has led to language-based abstractions--collected texts that include idioms, platitudes, palindromes, and other word play, as well as a series of collaborative, narrative paintings that incorporate text, circus paintings made alongside my children.
I like the resolved image to point toward the things that are mystical, theoretical or conceptual. I hate to quote Picasso, but he said, “Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires,” which I think pretty much sums it up.