What I’m always painting is my inability to paint. I’m
always drawing on my inability to draw. When I try to paint real things, what’s
called in the business “painting from life,” I get stuck in a dream of real things. Impossible
skin, protective water, the ethics in the planes of a face.
Better artists tend to paint their abilities. This honors
the world outside, as well as the painter's own gifted or hard-won skills. Skilled work is
always highly valued in this world, and justifiably so, but it also tends to
devalue inconsistency. Like the beautiful, palpable mistake of a yellow-white square
that indicates the sky.
There’s a current of acquired clumsiness in academy-trained artists that’s a
corollary here, faux-naiveté in the service of The Next Big Thing. You see
it all over the art magazines, but only the career-obsessed would hide their
abilities under a brightly painted rock.
To paint honestly is to work with what you have and what you
don’t. I want to go farther along that path, even when I use the same bad
judgment as everyone else.
The process of taking the world in and out of
sequence is the only ritual I know.
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| "Drawn Elsewhere"-mixed media on paper, 10" X 7" |
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| "Wilder Structures"- acrylic on wood, 10" X 10" |
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| "Leaflin At Barbara's"-mixed media on paper, 12" X 9" |
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| "Wilder Shed"-acrylic on paper, 10" X 10" |
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| "Leaflin In Light"-mixed media on paper, 9" X 12" |
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| "Wilder Long View"-acrylic on canvas, 10" X 10" |
