The thoughts expressed below are not an attack on any artist or style, they are a new understanding of myself.
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There is something with the human figure that fascinates me. As much as I appreciate those who paint or work entirely without figuration - I have yet to understand how to do it, myself, successfully. Certainly there have been a few smaller works, on paper, that I have gotten away with, but my successful paintings rely on human presence. Is this because the eternal, for me, is human? Maybe the anguish of unknowingness, that battles the glory of it, requires a human touch. Well, thinking of this now, it certainly does.
I struggle to find the “unifying image” that I so deeply seek without the presence of man. Non-figurative works speak to me, certainly, but they are aesthetic, sterile, too clean to be human. Elle recently asked me if I like painting because it makes me feel like god. If the ability to assert myself in space and yet possess the power to nullify it all the same is god, then we are all eternal. Man is eternal and I think that is why I put him on canvas. There is something abandoning about a humanless work, something that fights against man.
I have never cried looking at a Rothko, perhaps that image without man cannot move me. How can I represent the base state of man’s condition and yet not include him. Man is the primary victim after all. A dirty image, an injured one, one image that does not know what it is supposed to be - that is human. I suppose language is the same thing. I had an art teacher in school that said writing on the canvas was “too forward, too upfront”…is that not the point? Camus said “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide…whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories…these are games; one must first answer.” I want to be upfront, I want to cut through the web of nuance in human behavior that is the learned defense mechanism against the machine of society. I want to know and feel man and I want him to know and feel me. Is that not the point?
