I’m a process-led painter, and usually have no idea when I start a new canvas what it will lead to. I like to use paint expressively, which is not a unique standpoint these days. However I do prefer some control over my process, so that I’m not just mark-making for the sake of it. That’s where the self-discipline and acquired skills of observational painting you do when you are at college come in handy. Learning to control, and learning to let go, are equally important. I think there is nothing more engrossing than working towards getting a likeness in life drawing, but you have to remember that it’s not always about the final result. Its about how to observe and how to see, and how to quickly turn that into two dimensions. That’s the part that helps you later if you are an expressive painter.
Generally I work on several pieces at once, in bursts of three or four hours, maybe four or five days a week. I listen to music while I work, through noise-canceling earbuds or through my large speakers if no-one else is present, and often give my paintings names from whatever I’m listening to during the process. Names are kind of arbitrary in this style of painting, but I prefer this to untitled numbers.
My favorite painters and hence my influences are mostly American, but usually those with a more European attitude to color, such as Richard Diebenkorn and Milton Avery. Recently I’ve been exploring in a kind of Suprematist way in planes of color. I have always believed in the power of art to spiritually transform the viewer (and the artist) using only color and non-representational forms. If I look back at all of my work, I see that I’ve been trying to do this all along, without realizing. There is a thread running through it, a thread made of color and of form without meaning, and a journey of no fixed destination.
In the art world we have become used to the idea that new movements are a necessary part of “progress,” whatever that is. I think the time has come for us to realize that, in painting at least, it has all been done before, and each movement is as valid as any other. So I find myself in a Fauvist mood one week, and maybe in a Minimalist mood another week, and so what? I’ll never completely inhabit Matisse’s shoes, and I don’t want to be mistaken for Diebenkorn, but sometimes the logic of the work in front of you takes you down a certain road, and you have to explore that road. Along the way you find you have made the same decisions as your predecessor, and yet have arrived at a slightly different place.