Up to the minute news, published for my personal vanity.

Good Evening,

In my studio practice, I have become increasingly interested in the “objectness” of my paintings. As I continue making work, I am noticing the way I think about my activity as evidence of decision making expanding. Whereas initially my model for understanding a painting was layers of information on an active surface, my surfaces are less populated with visual information.

My objectives as a painter are primarily concerned with developing dissonant depictions of space. If space is a primary concern, the spaces the paintings inhabit are also important to consider contextually and as a work surface. The relation the object (the painting/s and the wall/s they occupy) brings me to think about this problem of “objectness”.

After some rather slippery conversations about craft; there is a clear split of ideologies about making… (a tired and somewhat fundamentalist view of craft vs. concept). This feels suspicious to me, I take away an understanding that cultivating uncertainty is very useful for generating mutations, unexpected results and experienced based learning. I concede that I am suspicious of any kind of fundamentalist or extreme views, this includes notions of purity within craft, or supporting antithetical views to a purely conceptual model of making.

What seems relevant to me is ensuring that uncertainty is present in ones decision making. I don’t think this uncertainty is mutually exclusive to a naive approach to using materials. The outsider or naive approach feels insincere and pseudo-unsophisticated, and impossible to attain given my set of life experiences.

So I am acknowledging a desire to work with some celebration of craft and concept, as a way to reinforce one another. Which brings up my interest in Josef Albers. In particular, his stuctural constellation series:

An Excerpt From the book THE PRINTS OF Josef Albers A CATALOGUE RAISONNE .1915.-1976 (Brenda Danilowitz) :
“Albers had been developing in drawings since I950 and which he called Structural Constellations (fig. I8). These figures investigated the anomalies of pictorial space by creating a complex series of open-sided boxes that were potentially three dimensional but that would be impossible to construct in real space. In the inkless intaglios this situation was further complicated by the embossed lines, which, being actually three-dimensional, assert a real space, however limited. The spatial illusion of the inkless intaglios went beyond the Graphic Tectonics. The low relief of the lines created palpable space, while simultaneously the Structural Constellation configurations-titled Duo or Solo, depending on whether the image contained one or two figures-teased the eye into a perpetually unstable reading of the fictive space of the picture plane. With Structural Constellations, Albers was forever searching for greater perfection…”

I do not share Albers view on formal purity or his understanding of perfection. I am engaged with the challenge of working with these impossible, understated configurations of space. I am interested in what happens when color is involved. Unlike his “Homage to the Square” series, Albers  structural constellation series remained monochromatic.  We will see what develops…