Alleged Realism: Where Truth Becomes Indistinct, Changeable and Unreliable
These oil and wax paintings and clay sculptures are an examination of portraiture and the figurative. The subjects are derived from of variety of sources: snapshots, found images, auction catalogs containing 19th century genre paintings, actor’s head shots, and portraits I have photographed in the studio. My agitated surfaces degrade and obscure the original reference and replace it with a sublime and resonating nostalgia.
I am attracted to the additive process of clay sculpture, a material receptive to fast instinctive actions. These recent sculptures become a record of gestures and mark similar to the qualities of my drawing and painting. I move back and forth from making a drawing of a painting to a sculpture from a drawing.
A large part of all this is a record of my life and of people I have encountered, (they thought they would be famous for ever) using portraits as a vehicle to explore the low budget mysticism of the quiet and ordinary, an American solitude (self-portraits at airports.)
I maintain a careful approach to a tradition of painting, an unsentimental contemplation. I use a subdued palette with simplified tonalities. Wet on wet brushwork is used to describe details, employing trial and error rather than improvisation. The works are a merging the representational (inward contemplation) and the abstract (outward appearance of the surface). The images are not renderings of the subjects gaze (taxidermied eyes,) but are mainly concerned with the real pictorial space of the surface. Yet it is a surface always tied to the figure and a sense of facts and the presentation of self. Painting has a language all it’s own. It is only good for looking at paintings.
BIO
Once a punk, a former brash neo- expressionist and street artist, but now I’m something subtler. I’ve spent a great deal of time looking at paintings and their surfaces. I have been looking at the surfaces of painting as articulated by: Frans Hals, Cezanne, Manet, Albert Pinkam Ryder, Robert Henri, Charles Burchfield, Arthur Dove, John Sloan, George Bellows, Jackson Pollock, DeKooning, Fairfield Porter, David Parks, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Lucien Freud, Howard Hodgkins, Frank Auerbach, Luc Tuysman and too many others to mention.
Early in my career I was included in The Chicago Art Institute’s Chicago and Vicinity Show in1983. I also exhibited in “Chicago Art Show,” curated by Ed and Nancy Kienholz, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL,1985. A friendship developed with them and this led to borrowing their Berlin studio for the summer. It was a wonderful time to be an artist on the island that was Berlin.
When I first moved to New York, weekly trips to museum and galleries consumed a lot of my time. I might spend weeks looking at Rembrandt paintings at the Met, and that was just the backgrounds. After many years making more or less conceptual abstractions, I returned to figures and portraits. I had been collecting flea market finds for years. In my collection there are works by the naive, academics and inspired amateurs, but all have charms that come from peculiar aspects of errors or an awkwardness that comes from overly intense observation.
A few years ago I experienced diminished eyesight. It proved to be cataracts. Seems I was painting blurry and greyish yellow portraits, as if the painting were showing the effects of future serious vision problems. Discussions about color with friends would cause me to doubt what I was seeing, it did not match the description of others. After successful operations my vision was again clear and sharp. You continue painting and appreciate the intensity of seeing.
I had thought as a young painter it would take ten years to get good at this. Painting is still challenging and difficult. But I can see it is an never ending project. It was at first an engaging practice and discipline and then a ritual. But it is always the struggle and that keeps it interesting.
EDUCATION
University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois 1975–79, BFA Graphic Design 1979.
Northeast London Polytechnic, London, England. Independent Study-Drawing / Silkscreen / Photography. 1978–79.
OTHER RELATED ACTIVITIES
Chashama A.R.E.A. Award. Studio Residency. New York, NY. 2005.
Bronx Council On the Arts, Panelist for BRIO Awards selections. Bronx, NY. May 5, 2000.
Studio Residency. Ed Kienholtz Studio. Berlin, Germany. Summer 1986
