From Interview 2003:
when did you draw or paint your first piece.....
have we not all been drawing since we were toddlers? I have a drawing I made when I was less than a year old (It hangs in my bedroom, next to one my son Julian drew when he was 13 months old). Should I therefore think in terms of when my first painting was done?
(using fingerpaints on the wall in the playroom qualifies as painting!).
First piece in an 'academic environment'?
My first memory of that experience: In Catholic school (second grade) when I was told to draw my tree with the leaves in an orderly fashion, not juxtaposing leaves one on top of another (that's how I saw it outside my window I argued...), when I was finished, all the other children's drawings were put in the hallway...all but mine.
Or in the first art class I took in college, when I was told by the professor that I was 'unteachable' because no matter what I drew or painted, I had a 'style' which was too much my own.....
The first painting hung in a gallery? The first painting sold? When will I ever feel that I have truly made a successful painting, one that can be thought of as 'a first piece'?
I rather think all my work seems like a series of attempts at capturing interesting developments of a life -- rejoicing, suffering, being; a seduction through painterly strokes.
Inexhaustible intensities with which to express the intricate weavings of humanity. To finally be able to create what lies within my subconscious, compounding figures of reality to comprise the structure of the picture field of my mind.
What are your paintings about, what are you striving for?
To capture light, color and value...? To emote through a visual comprised of lines, colors and figurative shapes what can be better said with poetic words.... To portray the tonal effects and subtle contrasts of color that help constitute the promontory, recesses, and folds of the labyrinthine of the mind, the genesis of the eternal. To find content which is not only valid, but valuable: which can stand on political, personal and moral ground--noncalibrated extensions of emotion, discovery, explorations of the psyche, expressions of a magic-real or surreal sensibility, a mysterious spirituality devoid of legalistic religion---all woven together with the creatures that express it.
To work forevermore intrigued by questions which hold mysteries lying within a multiplicity of answers, and to allow myself never to forget that I understand the necessity in life, to touch the earth.
With the same simplicity which makes me one who is simple yet complex seeking to understand the internal images impressed upon me through my experiences, my thoughts....I sit at this table of memories yet to be written, painted ....memories which are yet not much more than black and white negatives
