The Brooklyn Rail

I suppose I have never really thought of myself as being a contemporary artist. I’ve considered myself as coming from some ancient place and then managing to arrive in the present. I think I may have learned this from Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Brice Marden—artists who always seemed to transcend their own cultural reality, and yet they gave us the tools we needed to contend with our own today. They always gave us something to look forward to, even though they were channeling the distant past. I would call this a dynamic and dialectical approach to being in the moment. I’m not saying that artists should be detached from their own current political, social, and cultural circumstances. How could they be? What I am suggesting is that artists need to create their own sense of time and place; some accomplish this, to my mind, better than others. Some are able to provide us with a firmer sense of precedence, and the potential to navigate a direction for future activity.

I would like to look upon this question of the contemporary from an operational perspective. There are things that need to get accomplished, become realized, in order for us to properly understand the very nature of the activity we are engaged in. Our circumstances are constantly changing, and the cultural information we are exposed to is continuously evolving. This requires an embrace of a simultaneity of perspectives: choosing to follow the development of the work of other artists we admire and derive inspiration from, while at the same time forging a path in our own work that not only affirms the best of what we think we have done, but questions that “authority” to bring about new challenges.

I think it's good to include historical references as part of the work, a reminder of where we have come from in order to chart a constructive course moving forward. In my case, the paintings often consist entirely of imagery that I have pulled from the past and incorporated directly into the composition of the work. But they have all been mediated and brought together in very particular ways by me. I like engaging in the typological organization of a wide-ranging array of visual information—altered, recombined, and woven into a complex tapestry. I like the storytelling possibilities of this, the shaping of a pictorial narrative. I guess you might say I have a fairly scholastic approach to finding themes I like to explore in the work. I like to revise and develop in a practical way images I find in researching historical materials, mostly books, that I have come across. I really enjoy the process of bringing this material, previously unknown to me, into a new situation. I study this material very closely, and try to find ways of internalizing it, making it part of my working vocabulary. The outcome of all this, it seems to me, is the making, in some mode, of elegiac painting; that is, the taking of something out of historical time and holding it up as exemplary.

This is the reality of contemporary existence: there are people called artists who like to engage in certain types of artistic activities. They are living amongst us, and are producing things as I write this, and as you read this. Good artists obsessively experiment in many ways and are constantly evaluating the results of these investigations. Then the work becomes the sum of all these many personal, intellectual, and technical decisions; what to include and what to leave out, for example. When artists invent something, as they should and must, what they produce enters into the condition of a cultural resource.

Art celebrates the world from within an ecstatic framework and takes you into another person’s imaginative realm. The viewer gets to revel in the experience of a work coming into being. The evidence of its making is right there in front of you. This kind of human engagement has everything to do with the formation of knowledge, and the free exercise of emotional intelligence and compassion.

Artists have a shared responsibility to do what they can to help keep things moving forward in meaningful ways: believing in their own unique sensibility and capacity for change.