Artist Statement
“ There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.”
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“And just as I am vanishing again into the heaven
of rubbed temples, where no city exists except the one

in which the skull produces a repetitive, golden music,
somewhere far away Paul’s masseur says, your friend…

In this way we spend a small but substantive fortune,

a sum which would have been even greater
had I not cried out, as my masseuse left my hands and wrists
and prepared to commence elsewhere,

Stop, enough, no! To Paul’s huge relief,
since he thought I must want to continue,
and therefore he must persist while I am persisting,
even though he was in pain, strong-armed by his assailant,

and I thought he wanted to go on and therefore
I must endure the bliss that had become an exhaustion,

and we walked out onto the street relieved,
late for the movies, Paul Limping a little,
my backache gone.”
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“Guston did not reach for a solution but surrendered to content near at hand, abolishing the priesthood of modern art by declaring that the painter is the same person when he is painting and when he is not painting. The guilts, doubts, and obsessions afflict him inside the studio and out. Painting is one of his obsessions, one that he has privileged above the others but can no longer justify so privileging. Only by introducing it into the flow of his obsessions- incidentally foregrounding the continuum of his life and woes with the life and woes of a culture that has uses for painting—can he gain confidence in the activity as something seriously thinkable, leaving open the question whether it is worth doing.”...“But all he can think to do is work.”
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Rats, the owl, a dribble of hot chocolate on her cheek.
I am an extreme light, a wet shoe, a hand too soft, it’s 5 pm and we’re not ready to face
the kitchen.
I am a renter, a painter, a papa, a patronizer
We are jobless
Not hopeless
Some of us are surely satisfied,
But I’ve got my eyes on the ocean.
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This statement is made up of excerpts and poems from Italo Calvino’s: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Mark Doty’s: “Theory of Marriage” from Fire to Fire; Peter Schjeldahl’s “Philip Guston” from The Hydrogen Jukebox and lastly a poem by me titled “9/27/2010”. Because I tend to write plainly about my work, how it consists of images of my wife and children, how painting is all I really want to do, I thought it more poignant to share written works that I feel have an affinity with how I think about my relationships, my paintings, and their union.
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