Blog!LETTER TO THE VIEWER
(A personal response to my exhibition at the Pinchard Gallery in the Bunting Center of the Maryland Institute, Baltimore Maryland in 1999. It is thoughts on the perceptual process especially concerning the figure.to the paintings)
The figure paintings in this exhibition are all perceptual works painted directly from life. I have painted the figure for over forty years. For the last ten years I have worked almost exclusively perceptually, that is from life. Working “out of my head” has has also been an important part of my process and one of my great joys which I will resume but for the present I am completely taken with the excitement and possibilities of perceptual painting. Doing a painting “right on the spot” is very different from all other forms of painting, figurative or otherwise. Nature stages a fascinating but an almost impossible challenge. Coping with the challenge IMMEDIATELY is a very tall order. TIME is kept for the perceptual painter in a very different way - the artist's time, the model's time and the time revealed in the painting. And the viewer needs to take time and when they do, they may feel the difference in work done on the spot and other kinds of work. PERSONAL EXPRESSION in perceptual painting is another factor and seems to be filtered through an almost tribal preconditioning which the public and the artist both share. The recognizability of the figure distracts them and may obscure many visual meanings. Historians and critics have not pursued this difference in the artist process sufficiently. Perhaps you (the trusted viewer) and I should team up and write a poignant and no doubt heavy literary work dealing with this. I especially think of the above when I consider how I have been working lately. I am tempted to title this exhibition "GOING TO THE WELL ONCE TOO OFTEN". This is an old expression describing those compulsive individuals who can not leave well enough alone. I have been doing this in my painting and it can be very painful (as well as paintful) to be driven to keep these paintings open past obvious stages of resolution in order to get something further. I really think this exhibition will be about PERFORMANCE, the rigors, the risks, trying to be in every stroke, every decision. So after so many years of painting, the dance goes on, the performance continues. We are still trying to be the hero and perhaps ending up the fool. You be the judge.
