I first began making art as a teenager in the early 1970s. Later, I earned advanced degrees in painting and philosophy. Throughout the course of my artistic development and during the evolution of my studio practice, I maintained a predominantly conceptual, process-oriented approach to work in two dimensions. Because I chose to live life as a working artist, it became necessary for me to maintain shadow careers in other disciplines, some of which shared no affinities with the fine arts.
This duplex existence enabled me to grow in a variety of ways—in several directions—all at once. It also helped enrich and expand my understanding of the organizing principles through which my creative intentions must always pass.
A central feature of my work is something I came to recognize long ago as the sublimation of gesture. In drawing and painting, it manifested after an epiphany—my arrival at a personal understanding of mark making as an activity that is simultaneously additive and subtractive. I now saw the generation of form as a bifurcation of real and illusory space; an act of creating something that occupies space and describes the sum total of all that remains. What once seemed to be a dichotomy was reconciled in discoveries of how certain material interactions can assert or erase themselves in retinal terms (in plastic form with cast shadows) or in non-retinal terms (in chemical responses to invisible agents such as light and heat). Transience and the oscillations of the image-object and object-image moved to the front burner right along with many working processes and assumptions that considered, incorporated, or disposed of traditional approaches to drawing, painting, and photography. A way of working had emerged that mimicked the way I think. A more open-ended, hybrid approach to investigating the “secret life” of objects and images was now in play.
Recently, a very specific retrospective tone has surfaced in my work. Though I don’t consider my current practice a personal history project, I admit that I now find some of the formal and conceptual conceits behind some of my work from many years ago to be inspirational fodder for completely new work. I believe I am catching early glimpses of the overall shape of my life.
