After
seeing pictures of my work a few months ago, a curator from Barcelona
“Yes, self-defense as in to stop my
self from being drowned in the general churn…” But with few exceptions, the act
of jumping into a new painting for me is far from being a sanctuary or refuge and
more like volunteering for frontline duty in a war—reincarnating again and
again in the middle of a battle of your own devise where you’re both general
and foot soldier with nowhere to hide. As
the inimitable Ray Bradbury once put it,” You have to jump off the cliff all
the time and build you wings on the way down”
It is no breakthrough noting that artistically
nothing happens in a safe zone except spiritual ossification and aesthetic
obesity …. Sometimes I end up vandalizing my own work, thereby attacking by any
means the possibility of becoming, in Picasso’s words “your own connoisseur”. That is where the real sinking or swimming starts
and always treading between Scylla and Charybdis who entreat mockingly “Jump in,
the water’s fine... “
Representational or abstract?
Although many would argue otherwise,
my paintings are quite “representational” and “figurative”, except that they may
not represent many viewers’ expectations of those terms. Entropynk
for instance could easily be the face of God much more than the white
bearded Titan that appears in most ecclesiastical and traditionally popular
iconography which like the word “God” itself, reduces the irreducible for the
sake communication, but inevitably limits truth in the process. My paintings
are no less representative than if you took a section of a Turner thunderstorm
or blizzard or sunset and blew it up into a close up—minus Turner’s people, ships
or animals which do not appear in my “landscapes” as standard “life-like”
anatomical entities. But the paintings do represent
--along with celebrating the sheer eros of just paint and texture-- the blood, bone
and soul of existential conundrama.
* Conundrama, after Jim Harrison
