I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds. With painting, I always get the impression that you're sort of entering into a shared space.
I think you do kind of slip into a trance when you look at a painting. At least I do.
I can only think of a handful of artists that can make a funny painting or a funny sculpture without it feeling coined in someway.
I always like being surprised and sort of caught off guard by other people's work. So it doesn't cause me any anxiety to explore different avenues.
When there's a painting in the room, my eye goes right to it. It's like if you go into a bar and there's a television on, you can't take your eyes off the television. Paintings have that effect on me. It's where my eye settles.
A good painting has to do about 12 things at once.
The thing is that the money issue looms so large in art now. And it has absolutely nothing to do with art. If you're painting goes for ten grand or a hundred grand, it doesn't make painting any easier. And it doesn't make the painting any better if it goes for a hundred grand.
Maybe I don't have the same sense of humor. Maybe people aren't comfortable gauging a painting that way. They think that if it's a painting then it must be serious. I think Picasso can be hilarious, to name one example.
I think painting has that unique potential to project opposing viewpoints.
Paintings exist in the present tense, yet somehow, because of how it's structured, it can move backwards through time as well.
It's a funny semantic turn - when someone paints a landscape, no one says they "borrowed" it, only that they painted it.
I'm not a planner. I should be more articulate about what the imagery means, but I don't have a good reason for it; it's just there.
I guess I have no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if they sometimes read as abstract. I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche.
You have the 20th century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It's just a very human activity that takes time.
I give myself different roles. I think in different ways on different days. Sometimes I think of it as cooking - different flavors and different ingredients. Sometimes I think of it like orchestrating a piece of music with all the different instruments.
The internet might be a convenience, but it hasn't yet, for me, been a fundamental reordering. These things are supposed to be time-savers, so you have more time standing at your easel if you so choose.
I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche.
There's something retro about the pop culture references in the paintings, so I'd imagine it's not as much a pop culture reference as a pop art reference.
Painting has this ability to send the viewer [backward], but it's also this physical object in the room with you. It's always knocking you back into the present moment, which I find very pleasurable.
Technology's always changing. There was a time where oil painting was a new technology. That changed painting.
A picture can be funny and also weep inducing. One cries for many reasons. The state of weeping, for me, is induced by recognition of a rarified level of integration - thinking about what must it have taken to reach that integration.
There are different kinds of concentration required to make a painting, different kinds of being present.
I suppose some people find their voice later than others, but it's interesting to look back at really early work to see that there's some kernel or a Rosetta Stone, in a way.
People weep at music all the time, because music gives form to some abstract level of integration.
I think what's happened in art criticism, or art thinking, in last 30 or 40 years is a confusion between the "what" - the subject - and the "how." Most attention goes to the "what," but it's the "how" that's the important part - how something is brought into being.
