Artist's Statement

I have just submitted materials to a gallery in the hope of being considered for a show. Part of the requirement was that one submit an "artist's statement" along with a sample of work. Considering that I make my crust by trafficking in words (rather than images) on a daily basis, it was disproportionately hard to put into actual words an articulation of anything close to a "philosophy" when it comes to the meager scrapings that issue onto my canvases. But I gave it my best shot. Here's what I said, with no little apprehension and an acknowledgment that it is both inadequate and also teetering on the very precipice of pretension. Stupid words. Many of the paintings I submitted for consideration have already been posted here. Fingers are crossed and breath is bated accordingly. Watch this space, no pun intended. 

Artist's Statement

I have a hard time considering myself as an “artist,” since I am untrained and unskilled, and an absolute beginner. I began painting about a year ago because I was failing spectacularly as a poet, and struggling to come to terms with that, along with a host of other things in my life that were also equally hard to come to terms with. So one day I went to the art store, bought some supplies and jumped into the messy fray.

With that fascinating origin story out of the way, there are a few things to say about how I think about the paintings I make. Painting has become for me a place of no fear, the only place in my life where I am absolutely not afraid to fail, because there are no real consequences. Furthermore, painting has also become a replacement for the poetry I found myself unable to write, so that a form of expression that no longer requires words has become far preferable to the written word itself. There are a lot of words under the surface of what you see, but they are obscured by paint and too much overthinking about them.

Having said that, I seem to have stumbled into a series of genuine and consistent preoccupations in my painting. I am very interested in the interaction of color and texture, and still more interested in the possibility of imaginary landscapes, natural and built environments, emotional terrains, previously unmapped. I rarely set out to make a painting with any endpoint in mind, but where I almost always end up is in a new place that nevertheless feels familiar to me, as if I had dreamed it and woken up eager to capture it in some form before it slipped away. So, whether I’m painting Maine landscapes and seascapes from memory, or conjuring internal emotional tundras from whole cloth, what results is a fractured and continuous series of places that may or may not actually exist (yet). So I suppose I am deeply invested in very particular kind of abstraction, and trying to walk the line of that paradox with as much integrity as possible. None of my paintings ever feels fully finished, except to the extent that I usually, eventually, kind of, feel that I can leave them alone for now, more or less content to see them in a frame for the time being.

In this endeavor, such as it is, I also tend to paint in series, so what I have included in this submission is a survey of a few of those series. Obviously, I would not anticipate showing all of the paintings included here; rather, I wanted to provide a sample of the kinds of themes I have explored and grouped them accordingly. I could imagine a show that highlights one or two of these series, or a selection from all of them.