Now
Painting
Throughout my art life I’ve had an ideological opposition to painting. This is because when I first studied art, the old genre hierarchies still existed and painting, as always, was at the apex. For me, this was an authority that needed to be resisted, because the painting tradition offered very few new ideas and seemed to be the antithesis of progression. After 20 years of resisting painting, I began painting again.
Public Art, Social Practice & Performance
Gaston Bachelard said, “Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which binds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains.” I believe it is necessary for an artist to have both a social or public practice as well as a private studio practice. The two, seemingly opposing, methods motivate and inform each other. Inside and outside.
When I consider a medium I try to comprehend its material and conceptual meaning. Marshal McLuhan said, “the medium is the message”, this statement, in my opinion, is still an apt cipher to understand the affect new and old media is capable of conveying.