My friend, the polymath writer Bill Jack (MA, PhD, JD, MLIS), said to me recently:

“Your paintings are like Russian novels.  So much is going on but yet not going on simultaneously.  Easy things are made difficult, difficult things made easy.  The painting is vexatious, as they might say down your way but not up my way.”

No one has called my work vexatious down my way yet, but it’s time. The word is apt. It may be vexatious to see things joined visually that are not joined conventionally. Or it may be vexatious to find the materials so blatantly showing off their material natures. I want to cooperate with materials to make images. The materials, older and wiser than I am, have their own demands and beauty, beyond what I know to concoct.

Drawing and painting are holding each other tightly, constantly interfering with each other. It’s not that drawing is first and painting is last. It is not exactly that drawing is the truth and painting is the lie that we prefer. It is not at all that drawing is the outline and painting is the coloring-in. The two acts, drawing and painting get in each other’s way at every moment. My paintings are the plays that drawing and painting put on in ideas and colored mud. The animal or the field or rock, like an actor on our stage, comes down to the footlights and tells us that drawing and painting have made this happen for a reason. These paintings tell the story of their own making.