Selected Work 1973-2013
My work has always hovered between the allure of painted illusionism and the pull of the flat surface. This conflict itself became my subject. What began as an attempt to solve formalist demands and the conundrums of my training in the 1960s to avoid "picture-making" at any cost and to be "true to the surface" became the keystone that generated a lifetime of work. Drawn to the seductive narration of mimetic picture making, I also accepted and accept its marginalized status, its alleged "impurity" -- and so sought in my practice to destabilize illusionism, to undermine, belie or somehow challenge its very delights.
This is true whether I was dragging a heavy paint loaded brush across a finely painted velveteen sofa in 1982, cutting off the illusory depths of a watery pool by shearing off the very surface it was painted on in 1991, or using my invented technique to paint details of detritus from a stricken landscape on a physically rough, cast plaster substrate in 2007. I was always in some way bringing realism and abstraction into collision, and negotiating the terrain between painting and sculpture.
Fortuitously, this formal dichotomy unfolded deeper issues of content. The intersection of materiality and imagery lent itself to the creation of stories and metaphors with meaning; I have been able to use my essential discourse about form to engage with the pressing issues of societal and environmental breakdown throughout the decades.
