I’m quoting here from an interesting article in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik about highly processed food. Gopnik is writing about the relative dangers of eating highly processed food and the difference between that and the more natural processes of preserving food. He writes, “ As to the niceties of nature and art, the processed and the preserved? Shakespeare, as so often, saw the problem first and says it best. In “The Winter’s Tale,” he has the wise Polixenes instruct the beautiful shepherdess Perdita, who refused to include cultivated flowers in her bouquets, that ‘Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean/So over that art which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes.’” This, I think gets at the heart of what I’m exploring with my paintings.
Nostalgia
There’s got to be a better word for the exquisite sadness that engulfs me when certain songs I listened to in the past, now long gone, pop up in the random music mix on my computer or whatever digital device is playing in my studio at the time. I want to reach out to someone from my past, someone I shared that music with, and, I don’t know, hug them. Cry on their shoulder. Shake them when they don’t remember the feelings I’m feeling or don’t share the same sense of significance that the sounds represent to me. Then I remember I’m alone and always have been. Living a solo life inside my own mind, with my own memories and sorrows and ecstasies. Nostalgia—the longing for or thinking fondly of a past time or condition—doesn’t even begin to describe my condition at such times.
The Necessity of Art
I’m always interrogating my art about its purpose. I see my paintings functioning as dreams of civil positivity – like how our sleeping dreams help our individual brains understand our lives better, I’d like my art to help our communal identity understand itself better.
On Doing Less
I’m quoting from a quote here. I read this passage from Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music in a book about the great Californian painter, Richard Diebenkorn. It reflects a lot of my thinking on the question of what subject matter to paint about.
“My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.”
The More Things Change
I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, where my family had a habit of moving around. Sometimes we’d pack up the house we’d been living in for the last couple of years and start over again in a new house right around the corner. Two years later, we’d do the same thing again. In the ranch-style tract homes we moved around in, one place was much like another. They were all basically the idea of a house.
As I got older, I continued this habit of moving in and out of places to live. By my count, I’ve changed residences at least 25 times since the day I was born. That averages out to once every two years throughout my life.
The images I’ve been exploring in this recent series of paintings and drawings respond to this peripatetic pattern. In a way, I see it as an analog of the American Dream: this is a country that seems to be always climbing out of one thing into another thing that is much like the thing that came before. In some ways, it's the idea of change that matters to us most.
On the other hand, what really interests me about these paintings is the questions they pose while I’m working on them. Are they honest? Do they have integrity? Is there anything extraneous about them? Are they beautiful in a way that doesn’t feel gratuitous? Is there a dissonance that I can I resolve without breaking them?
I find this analogy useful to me: I try to make the paintings as much like music as I can. I follow an underlying structure based on observed reality and the conventions of visual harmony and design. Still, there’s a point where improvisation takes over, and I try to let them be a conduit for the unexpected and the surprising.
When I’m painting, there’s a certain point where I can feel something tugging at me, and I know that’s when I’m close to getting somewhere satisfying. In the end, if it makes sense to my head and heart—if it’s got a groove—that’s what matters most to me.
Smaller Relics
Smaller Relics is the latest in a series of landscape paintings I’ve been working on since 2011. The series began with the notion that, as climate change alters the world, our culture will eventually come to see the human structures built in the last hundred years as relics from a bygone era, a time that I’ve been calling the Age of Carbon. More recently I’ve been seeing these paintings as exercises in the art of looking forward with nostalgia, a way of finding beauty in the things in our world today that are contributing to their own disappearance, and possibly to ours.