Notes from lecture / American Embassy / Ankara
What most interests me is the fluidity of time and how the present moment can be expressed within the formal structure of the painting. Because simply put, right there on the canvas is where my thought and materials reach their deepest level of engagement with the natural rhythms around us, and the energies of the body.
The process of painting for me is always one of change. Everything that takes place on the surface is in the act of flux, shifting and thus activating the surface.
The issue is not what to paint, but how to paint according to how I am wired — my neurology.
So the question is how to make meaning. How far can painting be pushed? How can something that is just paint become so much more than an inert material on a two dimensional surface that extends two and a half inches from the wall? How can a Painting be optical and an object at the same time?
The musician Yo Yo Ma once stated that while interpreting the music of Bach, he was searching for the DNA of the piece, of the structure.
I find there is an underlying pattern and structure to all things inherent in nature. I observe the murmuration of birds in flight, and the instant shutter of a camera as marking time’s unfolding presence. My eyes adjust to these slipping glimpses, the arbitrary nature of seeing where the inability to hold this data all at once becomes the totality of my experiences, something I need to sustain through painting. Painting becomes language when it starts building associations one feels in the body, of relationships while painting. How we touch things, how we relate with other people, our relationships. As I paint, these feelings come up. How can I have two colors touch or not touch. Emotion is stimulated by color and how I touch the paint.
One pursues visual ecstasy out of deep necessity.