Alphabet Paintings, 2001-2006

Oil on canvas

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Visual impulses are difficult to attach to language and equally impossible to disentangle.  While immersed in the painted image I encounter a constant stream of divergences between language and vision as alternate lenses for experiencing what is before me.  One of my personal struggles as an artist is to negotiate the asymmetries and tensions between them.

 

I value language and have been formed by its diverse and ravishing beauties. The visual moment, on the other hand, seems to hover just beyond my reach, holding out the prospect of momentary contact with a world unmediated by the insistent weight of language and particular forms of thought that language fosters.  It promises a suspension of judgment, emotional honesty, immersion in experience still too fresh to bear a name.  Visuality has come to represent the idealized and unrealized Other Life.