On Style
I have always been a group show, and what I do is pure indulgence. I am unprofessional. I have little interest in a signature style. I work to be as open as I can be to the first impulse. For me, Style is a balancing act. On the one hand, it is the facility of expression—you can’t dance to the music while you still wonder where your feet should go. On the other hand, I want to challenge my habits, grow them. I do not want to restrict my expression to only established roads. The movement that flows with seemingly effortless correctness, we call mastery. The novice toils and explores new territory, is unsure and capable of stumbling. I strive to become a master novice.
Part 1, generalities
I don’t know from where or from whom my work comes. I receive something. You could call it an idea or, perhaps, an impulse, but it isn’t clear. It isn’t physical. I work because I am curious to see what it looks like.
The root of our word “translate” is to carry from one place to another. In this sense, the act of making a work of art is a translation. For me, the work of art is to carry the impulse of the source into the physical world.
The trick of any translation is to be true to the spirit of the source.
I would divide style into two components, technological and cultural. By technology, I mean the tools and materials. By culture, I mean the human environment a work will enter.
Take a look at the Mother and Child:
The basic thing is fundamentally human. It exists in whatever time and place humans are. It precedes words, ideas and images. How the thing is expressed depends upon the tools and materials available to the artist and the cultural environment in which the artist lives. For the visual arts, this is the artist’s visual language. Craft is learning how to speak, or see, a language. Style is saying something relevant to the living world.
A dead language is one the living no longer use. It can possess beauties and significance, but it can’t buy tomatoes. This is the danger of craft, one can become fluent in a dead language. We live in time, and a living language constantly evolves. It lives in interaction with a changing world. For me, craft is a vehicle. As a destination it is a dead end. You master it in order to go further.
I first learned the craft of painting by learning to draw in the traditional, Renaissance European style. This exercise was a great benefit to me. It trains the eye and disciplines the hand. But, I later went on to study Chinese calligraphy, and I would very much recommend both studies to those beginning this path. The calligraphy also instills a disciplined hand, but the forms I strove to make were, for me, totally abstract, and ink and brush do not lend themselves easily to what some call realism. In my experience, it is the tension between the two disciplines that aids you. Striving to attain both, you become expert in neither. You end up in some middle place. Fortunately, art does not need expertise. It needs life.
I don’t know the answer; do we know what we see, or do we see what we know? So, I am wary of those that know. Light enters through cracks in the structure.
Nothing physical exists apart from structure and limit. The physical is not all that is. I try to build structures that hold something outside of structure–the way a deck of cards and the rules of a game hold the random, or the way a bowl of water holds the moon’s reflection. I purposely limit a good portion of my work to only brush on canvas, and within that structure the brushwork contends between form and scatter. I strive for a middle way that contains both. I find it interesting that a major influence in the style I choose to employ comes from the characters of a language I neither speak nor understand. I believe I am looking for an alphabet within confusion, a language that contains both, the Word of God.
