Everyone experiences drawing and painting as children. I was perhaps one year old therefore when I was first initiated into the painter’s craft. I continued these universal beginnings throughout my school years and sporadic courses in college (which gave me few insights into this art). [...] I had only myself as a teacher in the art of painting.
My evolution as a painter paralleled that of art history in general, beginning with my prehistoric period as a one-year-old-clutcher-of-crayolas, groping through Egyptian and Greek periods; a Renaissance period; and then neo-classicism, romanticism and naturalism; impressionism and fauvism; cubism and abstract expressionism.
At nineteen I went to Europe, thirsty for scope and depth in Art which America lacks. Having established myself in the south of France, I absorbed the emanations of the modern masters who had lived and painted there. I was profoundly moved by the bizarre snow storm over La Côte d’Azur on the night of Picasso’s death. No such storm had ever been seen before in April, as old-timers in Nice told me. [...]
Fully acknowledging my debt to
'abstract expressionism', I nonetheless do not consider my art 'abstract' – a word that has been grossly misunderstood when applied to painting. For example, the telescopic blue distance behind the head of the Mona Lisa indeed is abstract, considering that the third dimension of depth is non-existent in the painting. It is illusion, trompe l’oeil. 'Abstract' painting is, on the other hand, not really abstract in the sense of the Mona Lisa, because it does not create an abstract third dimension, but remains a surface holding color and form on it.
Nor can 'non-figurative' be used to denote my painting, another umbrella term used to denote many unrelated styles that have emerged since World War I. All painting depicts figures in one way or another, whether the nudes of Renoir, the squiggles of Kandinsky or the rectangular clouds of Rothko. Painting cannot avoid being
'figurative'.
Painting is a non-verbal art form, and most often the names given to the styles (impressionism, cubism, fauvism, etc.) are derogatory in nature, coined by those who were ignorant of the artist’s aims. The best way to determine a painter’s style is not to name it, but to look at it. Beyond looking lurks that most difficult request made by the painter of the viewer: seeing. (excerpt from Crazy Devil Sweeping)
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