I started the painting Phases several years ago but set it aside until I revisited it last year. The title references this overall timespan and its subdivision into shorter periods. It also refers to phases of the moon, which I laid out in twenty-four circles in the painting’s foreground. The circles are pink and blue in varying proportions depending on the forms that are passing underneath. This illusion of transparency is really one layer’s responsiveness to the layers and forms behind it. I like to think of each component of my paintings as responsive to the other, so the whole thing becomes a unified organism or natural system. I also like how the title sounds like a prog rock album, which I think suits the painting.
I found a sequence of words jotted down to remember a setup for some music I made in the spring last year. Birds-Crickets-Microphone-DelayPedal-Amp-Feedback. I had a microphone hanging out of the window of my studio which captured the sounds of birds and crickets, which I then ran back into the studio through a delay pedal and amp upon which I controlled the volume to just start feeding back. Both this painting and that music begin with a sort of non-empty space - the raw canvas within a form and the sound of nothing happening outside.
Having Never Written Music also attempts a kind of negative expression. I wanted to see what a painting of mine could be without any variations in line or color and without any real background and foreground, just a continuous space. I think this painting works well seen from very close up, so one can lose sight of the painting’s edges. The composer James Tenney has a percussion piece, played on a gong, titled Having Never Written a Note for Percussion.
The title New Drone is a kind of oxymoron. A drone suggests an endless time frame that inherently cannot be new. This painting has more contrasting colors and forms than a lot of my paintings do. I tried to put more information into the painting until it began to get quiet again, just past the busyness of its intersecting layers and forms. That is often how I decide when a painting is finished, when I have just regained control of the picture, with an idea that either weaves all the parts together or separates them to create space.
Tamalpais is a mountain in California that I heard mentioned in a David Crosby song. I subsequently learned that Etel Adnan paints this mountain and titles many of her paintings after it.
Cor refers to the cor anglais, a musical instrument similar to an oboe. I heard one on a Phill Niblock drone, but had to look up what it was. Sometimes I think of paintings as instruments rather than as the resulting music, in that the painting provides specific parts, as an instrument does in a mechanical sense to create a particular experience. As objects, paintings and instruments also share silence, when an instrument just sits there unplayed and a painting never makes sound no matter how much I think about music while painting or looking at them.
For Mirrored Weeks, I imagined palindromic time, like a week that starts and ends the same way.
Night blooming cereus is a plant with a self explanatory name. I have two at home that come from clippings that my mother got from her mother, so they are family heirlooms. The forms in one of these paintings brought the plant to mind. I also started thinking about the simple inversion of flowers blooming at night rather than in the day. I made these paintings by painting around a negative space of raw canvas in black, then painting almost everything white, then black, then white again, like the cycle of day and night. I ended on mostly white. The paintings suggest a photographic negative with bright forms edged in dark highlights, like a landscape by Minor White.
The James Tenney piece I really love is titled For Percussion Perhaps, Or… It feels like it came to life on its own, no composer or musician, a kind of animism.
Landscape is a vertically oriented painting but some of the rough geological edges paired with red suggest a surreal outdoor space, like some Max Ernst paintings.
Mirror Non Mirror is and is not a mirror in a few ways. I began the painting with a not entirely asymmetrical composition and proceeded by tracing and superimposing a mirror image of that composition on top of itself, but only painting in some areas. I repeated this process with different colors and within different components of the resulting compositions. The painting mirrors itself from left to right and from right to left but not entirely nor accurately. The framing of the image creates a mirror-like form but for an entirely non-reflective surface.
One of the last concerts I attended, before there were no concerts, was by Sarah Hennies in Kingston, New York. She played a minimal and methodical composition on vibraphone. I sat in the front row so I was not aware that some members of the small audience were given little bells to ring halfway through the piece to create a surround sound accompaniment. I felt lucky to be surprised.
Sandy is titled for Sandy Denny, a British folk singer that I’ve listened to a lot this year, especially her self titled album.
The arp is the synthesizer Eliane Radigue used to create Adnos.
I worked on the small painting, Late Night Work, all year while painting the other paintings in the exhibition. It has been a constant on my wall while all the other works go up and down as I figure them out. The concentric lines are actually smaller and smaller layers of alternating black and white fields on top of one another. With drying time, it takes a while to do. Each layer in my paintings are responsive to the layers beneath them, but each form is also responsive to the other forms across the surface. The concentric lines created by the receding layers of paint either amplify or smooth out the particularities of the edges that they radiate from.
Subconscious Weeks combines the song titles Subconscious Lee and Astral Weeks by Lee Konitz and Van Morrison respectively. For my painting it suggests a lost sense of time. The larger composition in the painting is delineated only faintly by the slightly wider raw canvas lines, while the shapes in color have been fractured and atomized into an unfixed space.
The small paintings in this group of works all have corresponding large paintings with which they share a color scheme or a structural idea. However, they were not made as models or studies. In fact, Model was painted after its much larger variation. In all of my work, a painting is never entirely a model for another painting, but an idea within that painting might become one. Each idea is a test, that either resolves that painting or creates the conditions for the next idea, within that painting or perhaps within another.