The number one question I always get asked is whether I am going to explain the paintings. The evening of the opening I spoke briefly about the importance of the viewer and I would like to elaborate on that, I will first tell you that painting and language in the sense

April 14, 2015 By its nature, painting presents the interesting paradox of an object that is flat and inanimate, but whose essence is space and movement. I am reminded of what the late Kirk Varnedoe in the Spring of 2003 at the Sixth and last Mellon lecture he delivered at

Lecture / Vermont Studio School / 2017/ Discordant Voices These paintings are all oil and alkyd resin on linen done the past two years and although after many years of painting, I always feel like I am beginning again.  I will be reading some excerpts from my journals that were

Werner Herzog film – Cave – paraphrase Language refers to a certain culture – place – and an image is timeless- what was before – what is present – what is future. This is why translation is important. These images in the caves according to one archeologist is where the Shaman

I first met Ilya Kaminsky while at the Vermont Studio School. Ilya was the writer in residence who was originally from the Ukraine, the former Soviet Republic and was granted asylum to the United States in 1993.  Excerpts from Ilya’s workshop on craft- Ecstatic moment is standing outside yourselfTake preexisting

The process of painting is to go beyond language to reach the edges of what the rational mind can think and know. The possibility of discovering what is unknown beyond the self. Rational thought only suppresses the imagination.  Where there is color, there is light Does art that illicit instant political

Notes from Blue Fabriano journal. April 7, 2015 Roland Barthes —   “it had all been done before as no individual expression possible.” Is painting a hermetic activity? The question I asked when starting these new group of paintings that were titled “Traveling Light” was, could the meaning of the work go

2021 Painting can be a healing process as it deals with the transformation of vibrations of color that opens up energy from contraction to expansion. Painting can be a portal between the material and spiritual, between the materiality of paint and the infinite, while reaching a heightened level of consciousness, of possibility.  ‘The Deer

May 26, 2015 I remember reading the writings of Motherwell a few years ago, and coming across this idea he presented, about the love relationship between parent and child, or between the object. Motherwell stated that there could be a disruption between the child and the object, and that through

Morphic Resonance – each successive generation One generation generating the next. A pattern is expressed. When there is trauma, the pattern needs to be broken for a healthier pattern to exist. The intestine is a vascular network of muscle layer. The stomach is a gastric gland that functions how we digest and

October 21, 2021- Ankara Lecture American Embassy As the late Kirk Varnadoe implied at the last Mellon lecture he delivered at the National Gallery of Art, “ it is through an act of faith in the importance of our own experiences and perceptions that we create art.” – Spring/2003 I would like

June 2022 I have always been interested in music. While attending the Kansa City Art Institute I was able to hear some of the greatest jazz musicians such as Charles Mingus. He was dressed in black and his presence evoked his power as a great artist. He played his instrument where

Mbuti – paintings by Pygmy women of the Ituri Forest The sound of the forest through yodeling of vowels Language going back to the Nile – 3500 B.C. Aramaic  Gees bend Sound of gospel, spirituals The incantations, the timbre  Morton Feldman said the mourners Kaddish for Philip Guston The incantations

The continuous search for the unseen is found in the Japanese practice of Reiki, a technique for accessing the ‘life force energy of the body.’ In this practice the hands are the conduit that connects what Reiki Master Horoshi Doi calls Hado, a word for wave energy. As Horoshi Doi comments,

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

Experiencing light on the horizon poses fundamental questions. Science is a rational explanation whereas the experiential conveys the infinite possibilities, including the magical.  The horizon can be confusing like the light at dusk. Ambiguity of heaven and earth. Of moving between one realm of consciousness to another. This is what happens when painting.

I am in Washington and the colors are grey and have a film over them. I see an orange Gerber daisy and the color is so clear and so intense. I say to myself that is what I want in the painting. Reading Patrick Modiano and seeing the photographs of

A form based on fragments – Poland – national borders have changed over and over through the centuries – where multiple ethnic groups Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, and Jews, have lived side by side in a cacophony of languages and experience. I am reminded of when I first heard

Painting is a rational progression of irrational thought. We have our biological age that is different from our painting age.  The power is in the paintThe energyThe image becomes a portal to hold the energy Perception is not necessarily truth. We have seen that a lot in this country. But perception can

Russian word (krasnaya) – can mean either red or beautiful. The paintings become like bodies imbued with feelings of the collective group – peasants – Russia. The form is the collective, the content, the body. The Red Army stopped at Rovno, where my father was born. Red Army – Babel

When I really think that a literary novel is successful, I am conscious of being in the novel and outside it all at once. I begin to question how the writer set up the structure or armature of repeating themes, that allows the emotion to hang on, or be contained

Do I want to go where there is no smell of moisture, of Southern drawl? Where the roots have been left for too long and summer squatters have used up the soil.

Today I felt the correlation between the horizontal movement of painting and the earths platelets. The sensation of things that are not lined up – sliding as they meet. Relationship of words. The energy can feel concrete – but maybe not. It is the image, the canvas-paint-materials, that become concrete.

Why am I drawn to the painter Seurat? Material flatness – can go beyond the silhouette or forms that are crushed. Greenberg’s desire to banish illusionism from painting, insisting ‘upon the real and material plane.’ Painting could only be about itself. Stella- what you see – the flatness of the

Sometimes when I start hearing a horn play – such as Coltrane’s late music – the color begins to resonate and I know I have arrived with the painting. The forms in my paintings are generated from the patterns of the internal workings of thought which are independent of what

Abstract painting in the case of Mondrian or Malevich was thought of as a distillation of visual reality. The term ‘concrete’ referred to painting that was autonomous, that referred to nothing outside itself from objective reality. Kupka “Great art is to create from the invisible and intangible purely and simply

Vilem Flusser – defines an image as “a significant surface on which the elements of the image act in magic fashion towards one another.” The image is a fusion of past, present, and future in a painting. Jenson – Book on Architecture – “Social space becomes the metaphorical interface where

What does Bruno Shultz Labyrinth and Yates have in common? Annihilation. What is the meaning of Labyrinth in Shultz? Howard, “Every serious translator is a philologist. Translations offer equivalents and not substitutions.”

The first book about writing – one written in China around 200 AD The Art of Writing by Lu Chi. “In soothing the writer concerned about repeated themes, he reminded him that “a common song sung to a great melody is another way to find beauty.” A more structural approach

When I was driving from Augusta, Georgia to Abbeville, South Carolina, the light was so mesmerizing, and the air so intoxicating, that I had to stop the car before I ended up on the other side of the road. from Art Koans by Robert C. Morgan “Rational thought process. Koan

The tension in an Agnes Martin is that the painting does not allow you to get close – a kind of cool intimacy – her paintings do not envelope you – physically it is more of an optical experience of perception – eye/mind as Agnes Martin said, “I make non-relational

I had thought that painting was about suffering and building up the surface, but now realize that a thin veil of paint can say something too. On reading Proust – not from a scholarly approach but experiential. The more you read these long sentences where structure seems to be abandoned,