Painting

Standing in front of the canvas with brush in hand, I begin to smear the most brilliant turquoise pigment across the surface, when suddenly I stop. I smell something. It isn’t the fumes of paint or turpentine, detergent or damp. It is smoothing different. A scent so cloy that it takes my breath away. “It’s a Dum Dum pop” I tell myself. “I smell Dum Dum’s,” cream soda flavored to be exact.

The act of painting has a powerful physical effect on me. It can summon up moments from my childhood long buried, or throw me back into a conversation I had my grandfather, long dead. I can hear symphonies like I am sitting in the first row behind the orchestra pit, or taste the flavor of beef, something I haven’t eaten in twenty years. It can summon up the smell of fresh honey or clover, rekindle lost passions and fears, and even create phantom pains from wounds that have heal years past.

I don’t think of myself as having synesthesia, where my mind confuses the act of painting with some other sensation. Rather painting has for me a kind of total recall effect. One in which the sum total events of my life can come flooding back to me in an instant, even as I am totally engrossed in the act of making art. As the great artist and teacher Hans Hoffman once said “A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.”

I have heard of artists, Cezanne or Gauguin, and especially of Bonnard whose works rely on the spontaneity of memory and perception, paintings that allows us to participate in a single enveloping moment culled from the artists experience. I think about these artists as I work. An art centered on epiphanic moments that find a structure in extraordinary colors lain on meditatively like layers of afterthoughts parsed out over the surface of the canvas. The colors themselves are organized in thin lines that could just as easily represent the colors of the moment in recall as they could embody an intensity of feeling or a duration of time.

I am often told that my paintings are brightly colored, beautiful and the like, but when I look at these works I mostly feel sad. The viewer has no access to the immediacy of my experiences with these works, experiences that are profoundly personal. I wonder; how important is it that someone else shares in these experiences? Is it enough that my experience rendered in paint has become something aesthetically pleasurable to another?

Work proceeds slowly, laboriously, as memories and sensations both recent and long past wash over me. Sometimes I recreate the snippets of color that are most vivid, fuchsia and royal blue, mustard-yellow impasto and flame red. Other times these colors become a complex code of symbols that represent feelings, sensation and emotion. Again Hans Hoffman “My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.”