• early paintings, 1989 – 1995

    in 1989 i got out of grad school, and began making work without the voices that were working on me in grad school. at the time i was immersed in writers like rilke, hesse, thomas mann, par lagerkvist, alfred doblin and hermann broch. i had some sense of working with two seemingly opposite tracks of inspiration… one was the chance operations of john cage and the other was the angst ridden romantic atmosphere of the literature i was reading. the other element – obviously – was early american modernist painters such as ryder, hartley and dove.

    what was important at that time was to kick the voices of my teachers out of my head, and rather than trying to make “good” paintings, i spent a lot of time experimenting with both materials and presentation… and my goals were simply to exploit experimentation as a necessity… to do less of what i knew and more of what i did not know. by 1990, i had made a group of paintings meant to be viewed on the floor; and in 1992 i made a painting without the use of my hands – holding the brush at all times in my mouth…

  • and it emits a music…

    and it emits a music...
    1989
    gesso, oil and wood
    on wood