What Paint is to Me, a fragmented artist statement.

i am after what music has. a few seconds of great music dwarfs a whole series of painting.


i DO.    the more i DO while keeping from knowing too much the less i am aware of how much of myself i am putting out. PLAY.PLAY.PLAY. i DO and move on as best i can. Things are left to grow, for the stance to shift and settle. i find solutions to problems as they come up.solutions are unique to the problem. it is all instinct and feel. IT IS what feels right at the moment. i could never have had the foresight to know my work before i make my work. i only know it as i make it. AND then...a work must prove itself, as we literally live together. if we get along we leave each other alone after everything is dry. if a work becomes a loud nag i drag it down to the studio and its given every chance to live or it dies.




My best paintings do not concern themselves with being intelligible or formative. They first seek "to be". In the struggle to breathe they become formative,in degrees. The best ones stop before becoming overtly formative and friendly. They retain a mysterious livingness which solicits a "reading". The paintings are largely open-ended stories ripe for translation.

Art is my medicine against the rigid,restrictive,narrow-minded stance humanity is practicing more and more.

My paintings are pieces of myself. Bit by bit I retrieve and relearn them. I am not just painting a picture, but reconstructing myself and reestablishing a wonderment with all the possibilites abounding in the world.


"Art was the only place where most men could find a irrational,sensual release from the commonsense rationalism and disciplines of thier economic lives."----Robert Motherwell.

"It is not worthwhile suffering so much if he is not to go far."---Jean Helion.

My aim through painting is not pronounce final judgements, it is to suggest and hint at new beginnings.

Life is wish-washy. My art is wish-washy. Sometimes the two can agree.

An expression of bewilderment, a tinge of myth, an ability not to simply react but to contemplate and find contentment and satisifaction in all the phases of one being one's self.

"advising each other to keep working; it is the only advice one painter ever gives another"----Robert Motherwell


"the picture is not being painted by him, but is rather painting him."----Robert Motherwell.


>>>>>>>>>READ.   THE WRITINGS OF ROBERT MOTHERWELL.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

"Artists know more about their medium than anyone, but not necessarily more about anything else."---Robert Motherwell.


I wanted to be a jazz musician but I came out a painter. Everyone gets music. One does not need to know how the music was made in order to dance to it and like it. The average person does not ask what a particular piece of music represents. We just like it or not. Why is viewing and appreciating visual art so much more complex? Perhaps because over the ions it has served so many roles for so many people and taken on so many forms we are left spinning our mental tires in the mud instead of just kicking back and enjoying the work in front of us. There is a lot of work I do not like, or do not get. But maybe I am trying too hard and not letting the work share in the workload. Maybe I need to be more open and pay more attention and look more closely before I jump into comprehending all the meanings and contexts right out of the shoot.who knows? not I. not now. not likely ever.