Pursuing painting as a career
I have never felt particularly good at articulating with words. When I learn about something, I need to look at it and understand it as clearly as I can through its visual properties. When I was young my father would draw groups of five small pictures on a page. The group contained the same literal objects; a dog, a shoe, a tree. My job was to circle the image that did not fit. Most children have played this game, but something about my father depicting those images was important. He was able to make them very similar, changing only one variable so that my perception of their likeness was tested. It seemed very important to me to recognize the differences between things. It was really much more like a job than a game. As if my father was testing me; if I didn’t know this, how could I ever hope to understand the world around me?

My perspective on art as a career was always very narrow. It focused much less on a need to be creative and more on an urge to understand the actuality of things. What I needed was the slowness of observation and the result of something being made holy through my reverent study. The impossibility of observational drawing seemed to engage a world of need. I know a lot of people who think of this as a selfish trade. My task doesn’t overtly encounter social, political or moral issues, but it seems so urgent that these pictures are in the world. Not necessarily my pictures, but those of painters who have taken on this feat, far before my time. I am not sure that I would fully exist if those pictures had not been struggled over.

It is important that I continue this struggle because of an ever-present need to understand the things around me. To pay attention, examine, and redefine my world. The pictures are my way of focusing, of not letting in too much external information. I can block out the world and concentrate on a specific and still complex world. When I think of broad topical discussions of politics, world hunger, war, poverty I literally can not try and deal with it. Things in the world that should make me overwhelmed, I can in a way, shrug off and block out. It all seems very hopeless to think of issues on such a large scale. I think I have to process them slowly and less directly, if at all. Particularity, quietness, duality, and instability all exist when observing the relationships within my still life set-ups. I suppose it matters that I am a working artist because, like me, there may be others who can not deal with the world in any other way. Some people can not talk about the strong, overwhelming content of this world. But with painting words are not important and the unnamable is most clearly said.