Well, we both have full grey beards. And "It cost me two marriages and a relationship." So there's that.
and I like the part he told about his grandmother. " 'Just wait. We’re going inside to greet the light.' And I liked that." he said. "This idea, to go inside to find that light within, literally as well as figuratively."
He sounds part William Blake, part Buddha, part Stonehenge builder, part Egyptian pharoah, part Robert Smithson.
Where he looks up to the sky and wants to fly with his eyes and his feet planted firmly in the ground, I grapple with that rectangle of canvas before me. He puts in mind the universes peeled from the heavens on Monet's vast waterlily paintings. But there I am more comfortable with the work as a work of art on canvas. A painting instead of a thought or a physical experience. The image cast from the painter's eye to a rectangle hanging on a wall.
Artists of the late 1960's and 70s wanted desperately to get out from beneath the yoke of art dealer and museum. Works of art and the theories behind them had chased in concept from Expressionism to Abstract to bold stroke to coagulated surface to simple geometries to flattened shapes to photographic reproduction, paint absorbed into the very fabric of the canvas surface. Thinking the way forward was a path of ever evolving innovation and coming up short for how to do that, painters began to explore shapes beyond the rectangle and places outside the studio, outside the gallery, and outside the museum. Landscape art was thought to be flim-flam unless the painter mechanized the process into a recording of emotion and personal involvement was moved to an outer ring in the experience while we gaped in astonishment at the mind numbing effort. And then these guys started digging in the dirt. With machinery. HEAVY earth-moving machinery. Modern day Druids. They wanted to go BIG. They wanted to remove their efforts from the world of sales. These were works backed by foundations and the audience restricted by accessibility. "Put it way out in the desert. Make them come to the mountain." So now, the mountain is not brought on canvas to the gallery and museum audience . . . No, now the audience must go to the mountain to experience the work.
With my painting, I create images simply. I bring it to you, put it in a gallery or museum which is a central gathering place for the audience. Out of respect for the innocent civilians in this culture war I show them life as it is lived. I try to bring it to them. Here shards of color coalesce into the witness of my eyes. A simple thing, like the written word on a page. It is the vocabulary of my light and my life that I invite you to come inside to greet.