Statement
My paintings emerge from a determination to make art that can stand up to the rigors of “official” art world aesthetic judgment and critique, while still possessing the visual impact and oomph necessary to engage the vernacular glance of the everyday viewer. In other words, to make paintings that operate within and contribute to the discursive entanglements of fine art, while also being just plain cool enough to be worth looking at by a viewer who, whether formally learned in contemporary art or not, is very visually sophisticated from a lifetime of iconographic and logotypic training via mass media and corporate design.
As a slow medium in a fast culture, it seems to me that both contemporary painting’s potency and its problematic tensions arise precisely because of its material condition as paint—as an analog mode of cultural communication encoded for a nuanced, interpretive read. If today, however, even an informed and interested art viewer might give a painting only a few seconds of attention, I believe the work should be fully present enough in its moment to reward a viewer’s intensive, flashbulb burst of focus. This has led me to create works with an in-your-face visual terseness, which I call short attention span paintings for short attention span culture.
In addition to navigating the above disjunctions—cool to look at vs. discursively dense, and fast-glance vs. slow consideration—I work also to create densely-entwined, bare-minimal hybrids of abstract depth and activated flatness. To my mind such a mode of painterly space is less similar to Renaissance-style pictorial depth or to flat, modernist opticality, than to the flatnesses of tabbed, multilayered representations of information space.
On the other hand, like in-jokes or Easter eggs in a movie, the ideas and assertions made above are there if people want to find them, but ideally aren’t necessary for a viewer’s engagement with the work. My hope is that the viewer will take from or read into the paintings whatever works best for them.
My paintings emerge from a determination to make art that can stand up to the rigors of “official” art world aesthetic judgment and critique, while still possessing the visual impact and oomph necessary to engage the vernacular glance of the everyday viewer. In other words, to make paintings that operate within and contribute to the discursive entanglements of fine art, while also being just plain cool enough to be worth looking at by a viewer who, whether formally learned in contemporary art or not, is very visually sophisticated from a lifetime of iconographic and logotypic training via mass media and corporate design.
As a slow medium in a fast culture, it seems to me that both contemporary painting’s potency and its problematic tensions arise precisely because of its material condition as paint—as an analog mode of cultural communication encoded for a nuanced, interpretive read. If today, however, even an informed and interested art viewer might give a painting only a few seconds of attention, I believe the work should be fully present enough in its moment to reward a viewer’s intensive, flashbulb burst of focus. This has led me to create works with an in-your-face visual terseness, which I call short attention span paintings for short attention span culture.
In addition to navigating the above disjunctions—cool to look at vs. discursively dense, and fast-glance vs. slow consideration—I work also to create densely-entwined, bare-minimal hybrids of abstract depth and activated flatness. To my mind such a mode of painterly space is less similar to Renaissance-style pictorial depth or to flat, modernist opticality, than to the flatnesses of tabbed, multilayered representations of information space.
On the other hand, like in-jokes or Easter eggs in a movie, the ideas and assertions made above are there if people want to find them, but ideally aren’t necessary for a viewer’s engagement with the work. My hope is that the viewer will take from or read into the paintings whatever works best for them.
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