I suppose I’m not concerned about any one set of questions, but rather concerned about what a painting is capable of doing without written descriptions. What is the vernacular of the picture-making, and how do I express things through that? Some of the best moments are when a painting can describe back to me the feeling of my work just by looking.
I try to work every day, often doing three or four pen and ink drawings before getting out of bed or before going to sleep. I eat and then stagger into the studio and work and nap and make calls and do chores and then get back to work with the improvements I have been mulling as I did the other chores.
You want to find your own world in painting, and you want who you are to come to the surface with all that integrated knowledge.
“One of my most important goals as an instructor is to help students clarify what they are looking for in their own work. It is within this constant clarification that a student may begin to develop a distinct and unique visual voice.”
“Learning to get comfortable with not knowing is one of the last stages of an artist’s development. That’s how you start to develop the habit of questioning and seeking, which can propel and sustain you outside the classroom.”
“I think the creative act is very different than the ability to perform a skill set. I think that individual choice is as distinctive as the human being who makes those choices.”
“I am a humanist in my work. That is very important to me, to always have content, to always be involved in storytelling that is important to other people. Otherwise, why bother?”
Do people still feel the need to own, to have present in one’s life, an artifact, a painting, made by somebody else?
I’m lucky in the sense that I am able to portray my feelings with a brush rather easily. I don’t know whether I can attribute this to slow accumulation over a lifetime—looking at so many paintings, the careful observation of everything.
The ability to remove the cerebral assumptions of what you think you know and just respond honestly can be key to developing authentic work.