Dialogue of Generations Revisited

When looking at Dialogue of Generations I see a painting which shows the early development of elements that have continued throughout my career.  Dialogue certainly has the surrealist influences of Max Ernst and Rene Magritte, two artists who have inspired my work.  This is especially true of Ernst, whose experimentation with painting techniques led to works that merged representational and abstract imagery, which has been a continuing interest of mine over the years.  Dialogue also displays many of the abstract elements that occur throughout my work.  Square, rectangle, circle, line… these are basic to an abstract painter’s vocabulary.  But in this painting things become a little uneasy when a surrealist influence is added to the mix.  The circle becomes a floating spherical “balloon” and line literally becomes tie lines holding the balloon.  The balloon floats in front of a simple square which is improbably suspended in air.  And although the square reads as flat and two dimensional, as is often found in the language of abstract painting, the painting’s overall rectangle is a brilliant blue sky.  A simple ground plane, an element often appearing in my work, anchors the entire image.

It is curious for me to look at Dialogue of Generations once again in the context of this exhibition.  Like any artist, my work has traveled in many directions in the 16 years since it was painted.  The simultaneous exploration of abstraction and representation is found throughout my work and many components of my painterly vocabulary repeat consistently. The tie line and eyehook image re-appears in Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.  Lines and squares turn up in one of the Blacksmith paintings, and similar squares are seen in works such as the large Untitled 1997 from the China series, in Willow Glen, and in numerous other paintings.  A version of the balloon with tie line appears again in one of the China paintings.  Abstract elements floating in what can be read as either illusionistic space or as a flat plane is explored again in Berlin, where the imagery might be seen as city windows glowing in the night, but just as easily may be simple rectangles.  The abstracted landscape seen in Dialogue occurs throughout my work.  It is found in Blessed are the meek…, certainly in the China series, throughout the Willow Glen paintings, and in recent works such as La Mer (m.e.) and That Moon, Again.  (And, by the way, the m.e. in the title refers to Max Ernst and La Mer pays homage to a painting of his of that title that was once in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and influenced me when I was a student.) The idea of putting an object in front of a field of bright blue, which may be read as sky or water, appears again in the painting with the Chinese pot from the China series, in Briarwood, as well as other works.

At first glance Dialogue of Generations may seem impassive in temperament and classical in its composition when compared to most of my work, which tends to be more painterly, intuitive and involved with process.  (Dialogue was a direct translation from a drawing, which was a method I used much more at the time.  Now I may refer to notebook sketches for some basic ideas, but generally I let a painting take its own path.)  But what Dialogue of Generations may lack in emotion it makes up in humor and oddness.

And the title?  Well, I have been influenced by autobiographical and family subjects over the years and several series have focused on those themes, including the series Milledgeville of which Dialogue is a part.  So Dialogue of Generations could be read as a reflection on knowledge and history that is passed through a family’s generations.  In the context of this exhibition, surrounded by its “family” that came after, the title finds a new meaning.  Or maybe it’s a surrealist title with its references, if any, so obscure or convoluted that its meaning may be impossible to decipher.  I’m not saying.

Statement for the exhibition ...and out of the corner of my eye...

Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2007

  Berlin  2006

My paintings have always begun from personal experiences and my current work continues that approach.  However, in my recent work the personal is kept much more at a distance; identifiable imagery and narrative is less emphasized.  In these works the personal sources of my imagery are kept mostly to myself and only the barest hints, the most ambiguous suggestions of subject are to be found.  So, while these paintings find their beginnings in the familiar inspirations I have used before- memories of places, people or moments from my life, they retain little of those original sources and concentrate instead on the abstract elements that evolve as I work in the studio.  I have always been interested in depicting things that are difficult to capture, such as a fading memory or something seen in a reflection in a window.  These things can be quite intangible, like something seen out of the corner of my eye.  How do you translate these things into paint?  In my paintings I have pursued this by seeking out the indefinite place between abstraction and representation, a place that I have found to be very natural and fertile for me.

It seems that as I have been emphasizing the abstract in my work my paintings have become increasingly meditative.  You might say the paintings are frequently about “painter’s moments,” those moments in the studio when you are thrilled simply by the physical characteristics of paint, like a border that forms when two fields of color push against each other, or the contrast between a solid surface and a wash next to it, or how a small line scratched from the wet paint with my fingernail might make the surface come alive.  In recent years I have made a very conscious effort to work with varying painterly methods within a body of work, often within a single painting.  So in my paintings you will see pouring, printing, drawing, glazing, finger-painting, illusionistic modeling, and so on.  While this approach may seemingly result in works that are unrelated in appearance (in fact, I find amusement in the knowledge that some will assume the paintings have been made by different artists!), I believe that when a viewer looks carefully they will find solid relationships between the paintings, as well as numerous characteristics that have been consistent in my work throughout my career.