I walk every morning through the woods. I sit in my backyard and gaze up at the stars and planets, often in front of a fire this time of year. My painting comes from my time spent wondering at the cosmos, but it is not an attempt to describe or represent them. Nearly 120 years after Gauguin posed the questions they are still relevant, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"
I'm of the opinion that one cannot be an artist if one accepts the status quo. I refer not only to "the" status quo of society/culture/etc. but rather of the accepted norms of/in art. The artist of any age should look around and be a bit upset by what s/he sees. There have always been tastemakers, and to be fair, since art became a commodity this has always been so. Yet we have in our time an unabashed overreaching of tastemakers and merchants into the studios of artists. This comes in the form of anointment and the Art Market, and it filters into the very perceptions of what it means to be an artist.
I came of age in the conceptual art frenzy of post-post-pop art. From this vantage point I have never perceived Andy Warhol as anything more than a cynical anti-artist and opportunist. There is nothing moving or transformative about his silk screened images, not to mention the painful attempts at filmmaking at The Factory. Yes, I know this is heresy. But to me his work is a base misinterpretation of Duchamp. At least Duchamp was intentionally reacting to the horrors of his time. Though it's unpopular to say, today we would see Warhol as nothing more than entitled. His works sell for tens of millions, and the interpretation of that condition means it must be "on the same level" as past Masters. But I have never embraced cynical art making. I believe art serves a deeper purpose in our culture.
Abstract art suffers from the tyranny of literalness and social conformity so rampant in our culture. Mark Rothko's paintings are not, nor were they ever landscapes in any true sense. To call a Rothko a landscape is to belittle the practice of someone who was openly interested in transcendence through art. It smacks of the same indoctrination into ignorance that one witnesses in parks where a parent is with a child and tells them how to look at clouds. "Look dear, do you see the doggie? Do you see the fish?" Rubbish. The child was experiencing the pure formlessness of the clouds and this is the first of an endless stream of experiences that forces them to turn away from delighting in ambiguity. It's the beginning of forgetting how to think for oneself. We see this in how adults look at children's drawings too. Children are natural abstractionists. This is not because they lack ability, it is because they can still see. By the time a child is 10, that sight is nearly completely lost; beaten out of them by well-intended parents, teachers, pastors and peers. College freshmen arrive in arts classes so concerned about what everyone thinks, it is a wonder they are ever brought back to the artist's mind. I see this even more acutely today than it was when I was in college in the 1980's.
I don't offer imagery. I don't engage in overtly political or social commentary, though I certainly don't begrudge art that does so out of hand. I do not paint to be relevant, I paint to speak of my time and to speak out against the art of my time. What I offer instead, for anyone who cares, is painting as painting. The experience that is shared between artist and audience through a medium, without illusion or prettification. I don't speak of pure form in any Platonic sense. I speak of pure form in the way that clouds exist as conglomerations of water vapor, and how we can nonetheless lose ourselves in the non-thing of seeing them. When we forget our mind we see, and we find, hopefully, a collective/connected self. This is what Thoreau wrote about in the woods. This is what the Hudson River School tried to paint about. The bigger, broader experience that shows us our own insignificance. It can find its manifestation in any genre or school of art, but it can only show itself in an art that is autonomous from concerns outside its own practice.
