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Robert Ryman's comment about the
nature of painting in the latter half of the twentieth century has
always stuck with me: "It's not a question of what to paint, but
rather, how to paint it." My paintings are process works that borrow
subject matter from sources such as film and photography, physics,
biology, x-ray and electron microscope images, and most recently,
illustrations from anatomy books. The organic forms I tend to employ
are fluid but restrained, and part of their function is to articulate
the space that surrounds the form; paint is called to substitute for
flesh, for air, for dust particles floating in cinematic light.
I use squeegees, scrapers, and invented brushes to build up many thin
layers of paint that produce taut, skin-like surfaces that have almost
no evidence of a mark of the hand. Often individual images are
combined to form a single larger painting. The bigger picture reads as
a chart of microscopic and macroscopic space – a kind of catalog of
invisible things – that describes the slow motion dynamics of
evolution as it relies on its twin engines of random adaption and
mutation. The figures in the paintings are outside of time; they have
no up or down, no perspectival geometry, no gravity. They are pictures
of the absurd theater that is evolutionary simultaneity, of bodies in
various states that have succeeded in achieving their potential, and
then are willed by an unseen force to disperse and dissolve into newer
and different forms. My studio practice and the processes I invent
coincidentally approximate the way nature goes about its business.
The titles to the paintings are significant in that they add a third
or fourth layer to layers already present in the paintings. They're
often comical, the way nature can appear to be— in my mind, they
describe the shortest one-act plays imaginable. Often they rely on
language that is usually very specific to a particular discipline,
such as names for race horses, or pop music song lyrics, or punch
lines to old jokes; I think it fascinating, and useful, that these
tropes follow the same set of rules involving random mutation and adaption that drives the life cycle of species. |
