The subject of the figure in landscape is a repeating project in history. There is so much we never get right. Forms in these works may achieve temporary integrity. Though they must twist, pivot, rise, and fall, they also have mass and weight. They retain a grounded carnal presence. They evolve to survive.
There are meetings and encounters in these images, but they are multiple and difficult to describe. There are encounters with art. Gestural abstraction traverses a distant, lost spiritual ethos we may imagine in renaissance and baroque art. At the same time the paintings gather up my life as it is lived here and now, witness to the light we share, witness to our personal and collective precarities. And the paintings often gather up my life as it is shared with persons close to me, trials, pleasures, anxieties, love, all the temporary shelters we build together. A life spent painting means continually finding one’s life strange and new – distant and immediate. The distance seems necessary and may be painting’s most productive gift. The images must find the right distance from habit and category to make better sense of life as it moves through and beyond us.
I come to think of the works as compressed encounters that refuse conclusions, to seek, most of all, to keep happening.
