| I’m very attracted to the space within language where the ordinary meanings of words shift and suddenly we’re in new territory we couldn’t have dreamt of. The title of this painting comes from a Wallace Stevens poem with the line, “How clean the sun when seen in its idea”—possibly meaning that in making art, it’s refreshing to look at the things of the world with a kind of naïve wonder as if it’s the first time you’ve ever encountered them. I picked up this idea as an optimistic, effortless abstract notion and ran with it. |
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I’m very attracted to the space within language where the ordinary meanings of words shift and suddenly we’re in new territory we couldn’t have dreamt of. The title of this painting comes from a Wallace Stevens poem with the line, “How clean the sun when seen in its idea”—possibly meaning that in making art, it’s refreshing to look at the things of the world with a kind of naïve wonder as if it’s the first time you’ve ever encountered them. I picked up this idea as an optimistic, effortless abstract notion and ran with it. I took the line and made it into an object that I could look at and muse on. I started thinking about language as form, or the way language is our method of escape from our heads as it gives musical shape to thought sensation. So I made it a staircase leading up to my friend James’ head. As I continued in this kind of self-induced Stevensian psychosis, I saw a page in a Paul Thek book I have and noticed that it was a window. So I put that in the painting and liked how it was both an object in the painting as well as a kind of pane through which we can enter another dimension—the 70s Paul Thek dimension of assembled magic. Great. But first, it needed to function spatially and secondly perform its function as a window. So I placed a picture frame leaning up against it. I began to notice that the painting was resisting a resting point or directional flow for the eyes, kind of like the effect of all-over compositions, but with very specific optical cues. Narratives form, open, and shift their context to keep things lively. It became a very specific non-place that felt like my friends’ apartments, homey and weird. To celebrate the wild, dumb peculiarity of things was a great occasion for a painting and felt more expansive than sticking to a single style or painting idea.
Enter Politics as mystifying reenactment of impoverished states of the collective mind. In the Ironies of Human Longing, I wanted to make a painting about the burden that the natural world carries on behalf of humans’ contagious, voracious appetite for consumption and the American proclivity towards imperialism. A kind of sad, heavy territory that seems inescapable right now. I placed symbols of man’s absurdly vain desire for power, Bosch’s Tower of Babel, and some colonial-era warships on the animals in the painting. I split the picture with a showering tree of language to mimic God in the story of Babel, when “he” divides the builders of the tower up linguistically so they couldn’t communicate to build the bridge to heaven. The quote here is from Ovid—and I think it just about sums up phenomenological reality, but in this case I used it to lament the invisible human motivations behind the destruction of the natural world. In so far as they merely suggest a unified picture, I hope the paintings reflect too on their own emptiness—on the vast, generous, full, warm emptiness of insatiable consciousness.
