Every spring during childhood, my mother placed a crystal bowl of water on my bedside table in which floated three pink camellia blossoms cut from a bush in our front yard. At night, I’d lie on my pillow, watching them slowly spin and bump into each other until my eyelids betrayed me. They would still be spinning when I awoke. Looking is gathering information, but seeing is contemplation. My mother was teaching me how to see. She created the conditions for an experience that had no intrinsic meaning whatsoever, yet it filled me with a rage to live.
There is too much focus on meaning in contemporary art; people want to know what it means. They need to understand. This desire to know is logical if you’re reading a pill bottle, but painting is seldom logical. Seeing a painting takes patience and the willingness to perceive differently. It restacks our priorities in unexpected ways and entices us to notice that which we overlooked. When a painter does their job well, the richness of content supplants the requirement for meaning. Van Gogh painted a pair of old shoes on a table, but we don’t need to know what he meant to access acres of rich content because of how he painted them. Everything we need is compressed into each ropey brushstroke. All that’s required is our full presence.
I love the fact that a painting is an object made solely to be seen, enabling us to unbuckle from linear thought and drift. However, drifting implies moving away from something. What is my something? If you had asked me to define my work as either abstraction or representation thirty years ago, I’d have barked out the former. Now I’m not so sure. I am not an abstract artist. What does that even mean? I am a landscape painter who constructs images by abstracting from the visible world. Abstraction is a process, not a style. Saying you’re painting abstracts is like saying you’re eating cooking: it doesn’t mean anything. To abstract means to remove, which implies it must be removed from something. I no longer believe that a painting can be about paint. Philip Guston was right: “Painting is impure.” He goes on, “We are image-makers and image-ridden.” What get promoted as abstracts in many galleries are actually representational paintings of abstraction, pushing paint around in a manner that looks like art, usually someone else’s. What are you abstracting from? My paintings must extend from real things; otherwise they look too much like art. It’s fashionable to claim that your work is open to interpretation or that it can be about whatever the viewer wants, but that’s marketing horseshit. What are you communicating? Sure, painting realistic water droplets on a chicken is impressive, but that’s not art. Some painters have a voice and lousy technique, while others have astounding facility but no soul; they’re just taking victory laps. Those who possess both have molten lava. Be yourself—the rest is just constant practice.