It's been a heavy week here at Henri. I've started my new series of history paintings and it's been taking a lot of my time. As you know Postmodernism has been the theme for the last couple of weeks. I felt it was important to take a stance against this theoretical visual pollution in a very clear way, and I think I have laid out fairly succinctly what the problems are. Additionally, Henri and I have discussed at length this particular post. He wants me to discuss my work in relation to postmodernism and I've been trying to find a clever way to do it without being auto biographical. I do not want to bore you with my personal bullshit, but I feel my work is directly addressing issues that I've seen in postmodern painting. And I came to this after understanding my own myopia a few years ago. I will try to keep the bio to a minimum.

I had succeeded in learning how to paint well and in learning to paint well I wound up painting like everyone who painted well - my sources were evident, my inspiration was second hand and the part of the work that was me was lost in the posturing and ironies of POMO abstraction. I had become a mannerist of a mannerist. This all struck home one evening over dinner with a critic, a dealer and a collector - who were planning my future in front of my eyes. I was told that my work had quality and would go far. What bothered me was that no one told me I was original. Two days later in my studio - I began to search for something else that took me away from this planned path. I dropped out of the AW.

What was driving me was my dissatisfaction with abstraction. I felt it had become this pumped up thing - all flourish and bluster - without any feeling for life. It was painting about painting about painting rather than a direct visual experience of existence. I realize this is a romantic idea, but I wanted my life to be in the paintings - I wanted them to be smart and vibrant at the same time instead of looking like the reworked corpses of painting that I kept seeing in the galleries and in my very own studio. ABEX painting had that life, that immediacy, and I believe that force is what has fed the abstraction of the parasitic POMO artists. They needed Pollock and DeKooning in order make their work. That being said - I also realized I could NOT paint like the ABEX generation. To lay down a goopy stroke, an all over compostion is ridiculous at this time. I wanted something new, something that would allow me to be direct, but not rear garde, reactionary or nth generation. I had to find a new way through.

I have discovered a couple of guiding principles found in Stella's Working Space and Hockney's Secret Knowledge. The first discusses issues relating to visual form and space. The second deals with the mechanics of vision. I thought this was a good place to begin - how to put together a painting and what it would visually entail.

First the mechanics - I decided that I wanted to retain the idea of process - the actual working of an image to keep it open and fresh without pushing paint around in the usual ways. Drawing is a good way to develop process - to create openness - and by that I mean the delineation of form and volume is done with cross hatching - the repetition, the cross stroke - each would become a brush stroke. I could then use these strokes to refit the chiaroscuro and play against it - create volume in a traditional way - closed way - light and dark - then flatten or form with the drawing. Chiaroscuro is a closed system - it creates form and space through blending. It is found in lens based work. It is the traditional path to "realism." Drawing - cross hatching - creates visual interaction - the viewer "finishes" the form - openness. It had been done for centuries, Michele, Tintoretto, Titian and others - opened up their paintings in this way. It is this openness that is part of the reason master drawing is so admired and looks fresh to "modern" eyes hungry for process. I didn't have to rely on the traditional tropes of abstraction - throwing paint around, drips, scrubs, whatever - it all would be reworked in the drawing. Process is not in the physicality of materiality or fetish finishes, but in the play between illusions of form and space / light and dark and the drawn technique.

Second I could move beyond lens based image reproduction - the idea of the photobased postmodernist. Lens based images allow for isolation. Isolate the brush stroke, isolate the form, isolate the technique, isolate the finish, isolate the process. We move into the images. This is not going away, we can not reclaim Western disinterested space. As we move in the tactile nature of vision is enhanced at the expense of distance - in other words we feel what we see - it is why when we watch a love scene we see quick cuts of close up images of the lovers' bodies - we are meant to feel with our eyes. Or a car chase is done in very quick cuts showing close up images of parts of the car and landscape - it all plays on our visual tactile sense. Once again this cut and trace vision (or scanning) is not going away - lenses proliferate our lives, we use them to see, to feel, to understand. I want to incorporate that vision in a different way. I want the close up - to induce tactile vision - but I want to create a more complex environment found by overloading the spaces. If we move in close enough the image breaks down, if we cut the image enough it reforms, if we keep moving into the the 2 dimensional it becomes 3 dimensional. As an example - in the movie Blade Runner - we see a picture of a room - one looks AT a picture not into it - it remains flat - a series of visual tropes that add up to reality. The computer allows us to zoom in - suddenly we are in the pictured room - moving past objects and forms - until finally we move into another room entirely - to discover a figure in bathtub. We have created space by zooming in - by moving close. I want my painting to be done in that next room, a reality beyond the brush stroke, the reproduction and the fetish finish of postmodernism. By moving in I am creating tactile space and opening the forms - I have found my Working Space.

Third is related to my own vision, my own idea of what that space and form would entail - based on how the electronic lens sees I am free to fold and manipulate space in a different way. By seeing differently the spaces, angles and forms activate differently. Example: in a cubist way I can show form from any angle - a figure can be seen front and back - but with tactile vision I can turn front and back inside out - I can draw over chiaroscuro or shade over drawing - I can push space both in front and behind form - I can manipulate the processes of illusionistic painting, and I can move through time - all at once - without sequencing. It is similar to the way we have extended our nervous systems across time zones. We exist everywhere in the electronic world without using our eyes to understand. What does it look like to be turned inside out? Abstraction was developed to explore interior processes. Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Pollock DeKooning - all of them were about examining interior processes in a new visual way - bringing the inside out. Our society - through electronic lens based programming - is now an "outsided" world of interior processes. We pour our subjectivity into the electronic world and for the first time in Western civilization - sight does not lead the way to understanding. Abstraction is the only way to discover this vision. I keep coming back to Secret Knowledge and the "wonky vision" of human interaction. In our "bricks and mortar" lives we still see through two eyes - peripherally. This disconnect between our fleshy interiority and the extended electronic subjectivity means that we physically, visually understand little around us. Ideas have no basis in actuality. It's similar to the story of the forest people who come out of the jungle to see a vast savannah and not understand the spaces of the vista in front of them- one reality blinds us to the other. It is the myopia of lens based vision that has limited our spaces and forms. My paintings are meant to work the eyes in this reversed way - I want to throw open the idea of a different type of vision by pushing into the dimensional limits of materiality. I refuse to engage in the physical limitations of American abstraction. I am looking to define this new abstract visual space of interior processes.


Finally I am free to paint anything - ANYTHING - without the underlying ironic distance. There is no longer any reason to have to deal with the endgame that continues to hamstring abstraction. I can push the abstraction away from the American position and engage in a free form, volumetric, new abstraction tied to the way I see. I can make it figurative or pure, I can quote rather than appropriate, I can develop new forms and spaces for my painting. I am beyond the postmodern.The paintings included here are intimate. They are portraits or genre painting rather than the much grander history painting that we see in galleries today. They are a way to see a figure in a room - the way Matisse would paint his nude model or Picasso would paint a portrait. They are not about large statements but about a visual encounter with someone close and seeing their form with new eyes. I move quickly from realism to abstraction and back again, I've pushed space into itself and I've moved forms through lenses to sight. I think the idea of this intimate viewing is something we no longer do and it is why I have remained doing it for a number of years. Modernism started with a collapse into this kind of intimacy and it was lost at the reawaking of history painting by the Abstract Expressionists. (I think this idea should be examined in another post.)

If you want to see more go to my web page. If you're interested in hearing more drop me a line.