1. Wonderful art is created from all sorts of
stuff. I am primarily a painter but I have constructed large and small
scale installations from wire and dish detergent and home furnishings
and shopping carts and contraceptive appliances Anything goes,
material-wise, and it sure pays to keep an open mind. But I do seem to
keep returning to paint.
2. Just what I am trying to say with that pile of
jello, anyway? Probably the same thing I'm attempting to "say' with
that abstract painting. I am neither an agenda driven producer of
exclusively political works, nor am I a proponent of purely formal
concerns. I am, more or less, a happy hybrid awash in my own synthesis
of the many possibilities available to the contemporary artist. Just to
complicate matters, I ultimately don't believe that art has to be
"about" anything; I can’t see that art must necessarily he
didactic to be effective. Art isn't like underwear or baling wire
existing for some predetermined, set purpose.
3. Whether they saw cows in half, meticulously
render still lives, present images laced with issues of gender and race,
or make abstract paintings, I feel that artists and their work are
inescapably products of their time. We live at a time that has seen an
incredible expansion in the definition of art and this has spawned both
confusion and prodigious enlightenment. Thank goodness the world is
still big enough to hold all of our ideas!
4. Art can and does change the world for the
better. It is an essential catalyst for positive change in a weirdly
unstable world intent on running amuck. It can also be a whole lot of
fun, and that's no mean trick
5. What you see may or may not be what I see. Art
is truly collaboration between the artist and the viewer. Both are
important, and it takes two to tangle. There is probably no one way to
"see" art.
6. The only universal constant is that I love art:
the making of it, the viewing of it, the consuming of it, the arguing
over it. It is one of the few things I am capable of approaching without
cynicism. The longer that I am involved with art, the less I presume to
"know" about it. I simply know that I make and consume it, and
am a better human being for that experience.
