I am a painter. I’ve been making paintings for a long time.

I’m interested in the tradition and lineage of painting, each work a single star in a broad shimmering of constellation of art that exists on the planet.

I’m interested in the Renaissance painters who stretched the first canvas after watching frescoes rotting off salty Venetian walls. I’m interested in the work of the surrealists, like Gertrude Abercrombie’s painted shells and ribbons on a table, silently communing with each other and us. I am interested in the painting of a table with no still life on it. 

I’m interested in looking, I’m interested in light. I’m interested in the way Michaël Borremans paints light (the way god would paint, with broody Belgian light filtering through tall warehouse windows). 

But then, every painter is painting light. 

And me now, today, painting? I try to not think too much. I try to see and feel and then paint what I feel. Usually too much thinking gets in the way of making a good painting. 

I’m interested in the absurd, the taboo, the laughable. I like this very much when looking at a painting and making a painting. I have a child and we look and think and then sometimes laugh together, one of my great delights.

We laugh at the embarrassing, the erotic, the surprising. I think of Josh Smith's watermelon paintings. They are rendered with the hand of a child, one large watermelon on each panel, then many many panels. There are so many of them, they make me laugh. He writes that his work is rolling a watermelon up a hill (with paint). Josh Smith is like a brother I’ve never met. 

My painting practice is concerned with the big M, which is the mystery. When I think I know something, the universe reminds me, ‘no, no, you don’t know’. And I don’t like this probably because I’m a Leo. I’m a slow learner, and I learn slowly. I see that I’m meant to be the fool now. In the sense of the archetype. It’s not so bad.

David Whyte considers this as well. “There's no human life that isn't like the cycles of the moon where we're on the up and up for the first half of the cycle and then we're waning. Then there's three days and three nights of every metaphorical month when the moon disappears and you don't know what's going on. You think you're supposed to know what's going on all the time but no, no, you're just meant to not know.” *

So I paint, and I paint, and I paint. I get farther away and then closer to these ideas as days pass, and weeks and years. All this is harder and easier than it sounds, and really, it’s the work of a lifetime.

*From Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin: David Whyte (Part 1), Nov 6, 2024