To Talk of Many Things

The idea of Painting is a cultural premise. The actuality of a painting is an immediate experience, “a thing”, if you will, a thing that painters do. My ideas about Painting can too-specifically qualify/ limit your experience of my paintings. “No ideas but in things” the poet William Carlos Williams lyrically declared, tactfully avoiding such indecorous overstatement. His process was to observe vernacular expression of an “American idiom” and take poetic measure of it via his “variable foot”: a form of close listening and pattern recognition of elastic linguistic rhythms. I can relate a similar process to my painting. In the past I’ve cut up the idioms, logos of corporate and commercial signage (international now) to transcribe their familiar texts, color forms and shapes into paintings. I realized that the shared rhetorical impact of such languages could dependably (because of our common conditioning by such) be further objectified (made a thing of) into minimally-determined color, forms and patterns. As a result those idioms/ representations came to exist virtually as “sounds” in my paintings, via their compositional intervals, asymmetric line breaks and color harmonics. Dizzy Gillespie’s comment, “I’m not interested in music, I'm interested in sounds”, is relevant here. No ideas but in sounds. So, just as the category Jazz doesn’t really describe its subtle sonic variations, so the idea of Painting can’t really express the elastic measure of visual experiences in a painting. I’ve described my work as generic abstraction, simply to keep the door ajar for that “variable foot.”