|
As with all of my work, I continue to try to find a place between chaos and organization, walking the fine line between complete breakdown and rigidity. This means that somewhere between chaos and control, I need a space where development can take place in such a way that I am neither lost in the chaos or strangled trying to operate within a fixed structure. My work also represents an ongoing desire to put right what was damaged or destroyed. A lecture/retrospective given in 1998 at Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute was entitled "Destruction and Reparation in the Creative Process: A Retrospective". I was trying to show that from my early paintings the forces of destruction within me, destruction toward the loved people in my life, were countered by my wish to bring to life what was lost and to repair what was damaged. I tried to illustrate how this happened as I showed slides from my early painting days to the present.
By engaging in a constant experimentation with my work, I allow the play of destructive and loving forces that, I hope, permeates all of my paintings. I let myself uncover, reveal and open myself up to being surprised or dismayed by what happens in front of me while I paint, by what I bring forth. I would like to think that I work at a point of juncture where instinct and intelligence meet. I have no interest in the post modern intellectualizing concept of art that insists that a painting is a text and must be read. Affective properties, the mood of a painting, cannot be coded with the intellect alone. I would rather have the viewer find enough in scanning my paintings' surfaces inch by inch, moving from mood to mood to find their resonance. I hope that through this scanning there will be a correspondence between what has happened to me while painting and what the viewer experiences when in front of them. And this seldom means that the viewer's response can be articulated verbally. I am in fact suspicious of too many words when it comes to art because the words tend to reduce its affective impact and superimpose intellectual constructs that fail to capture the essence of what should be, after all, a nonverbal experience.
April, 2000 |
|
