“New Work”
For exhibition at MPG, Boston, MA, October, 2002.
These paintings include several themes that have existed in my work for a number of years: windows, the urban landscape, the relationship between indoors and outside.
They started from a reaction to something seen, which then triggered two responses. The first was a feeling or an emotion – the quiet aloneness, for example, that I sometimes feel in an office building at dusk. The second response was the fairly straightforward thought: "I want to paint this." It may have been simply because it was beautiful or potent and I wanted to preserve it. Or perhaps it just looked like it would be interesting to make it with paint.
I think that the emotion first felt falls away, and resolving painting problems takes over. And so the paintings become partly about how it feels to be in a room and to look out onto the wide open light outside. But also about how to capture light from both inside and outside, and how to structure all this information as simply as possible. Or what happens to the city when seen from a window looking out to rooftops below. Or any of the other myriad formal considerations.
But then the painting problems get resolved and I think the painting is back to being about that initial emotion. When it's done right the emotion comes through clearly; the painting seems to communicate something, but it's extremely difficult to articulate that thing with words.