Boston 1986

Personal Statement

There is a moment, in the making of a painting, a limb will lift, a body will turn, where the separation between the painted surface and the remembered experience disappears and the work, taking on certainty, moving onto the plain of the imagination, becomes the experience. At this moment when the act of painting has become an extension of myself, it is not what I do but what I am that matters: If I have enough mastery and knowledge of the medium, I have the opportunity to mark out my humanity in a living record, I have the chance to be fully in the medium. Form and content are fused. All has to be refound in the paint and the gesture of the body. The movement of the brush is the vehicle for connection and transformation. The residue – the painting – comes from the knowing of an aesthetic tradition – a language – and from the subversion of that knowledge by my presence in the medium.

Without the memory, both personal and historic, inherent in the tradition, the work becomes reductive of the human experience. Without the personal subversion or redefining of experience in the process, the language degenerates. The opportunity for me is that painting is a medium in which meaning can be returned to and communicated by experience – a place where thought and idea can be rooted back into the corporeal reality from which they come and where, riding our imagination, we can explore our humanity.