The years teaching in Florida were lonely and alienating. My 80 hour work weeks left no time for I needed to find my way home. I returned to Washington DC with hopes of re-establising my marriage and re-locating myself as an artist. By the winter of 2002, it had been over 8 years since I had painted. My initial attempts were alarming. I felt like a musician picking up an instrument after years without practice and it was not clear that I either had anything to say or the facility needed to say it. The process, however, took on a life of its own and I was gripped by a compulsion the led the way. Gradually I began to see my perennial artistic concerns, my lived experience of the past decade and the process of reestablishing a marriage, community and home mirrored in the work in front of me.
The first real breakthrough came when I tentatively drew the primordial outlines of a house over the chaos of work in progress. I realized immediately that I had found the key to organizing both the formal relationships of the painting and the underlying subject matter. In building my paintings I am building my home and myself. A determination to make the "best" of things is showing me how to make the "best" of cadmiums, turpentine, fabrics, ideas and a raw stretched canvas. The upshot is that I have never been more excited and hopeful. I think I have always been a strong painter – but I believe this work will be richer and more deeply rooted than any before. I am working feverishly, but even so it will take most of a year to bring these threads together. The process feels somewhat like staging a comeback. I've disappeared from the local scene and will be re-emerging with a new body of work.
I have always thought of the language of painting as a metaphor for the activity of composing of a life. As mentioned before, I feel that the most fundamental principle of painting is that of relationship. No element on the canvas lives in isolation, but only as part of a complex web of relationships. Delacroix's famous statement,"Give me mud, let me surround it as I think fit, and it shall be the radiant flesh of Venus," could as well be said of effectively composing a life. We build our home out of available materials. We don't always have the people or circumstances we want. We are often without the appropriate wisdom or maturity. But regardless of our resources, we strive to make our home as comforting as possible. A relaxed apprehension of the parts to the whole can enable the balancing of a delicate and contingent world often more beautiful and satisfying than any we might craft under ideal circumstances. This precarious juggling act was played out between painting and life. Things teetering out of control were saved, at times, with a touch. What was aching and twisted could become hopeless or be magically transformed. There was always a very real possibility of losing control. Making things work depends on elusive gifts.
My experience teaching digital art gave me a new set of painting tools. A large format Giclee printer (44" by up to 100') allowed the weaving of digital imagery into the painting surface. The interaction of very tactile elements (fabric, paint, glue, objects) and computer generated imagery (both photographs and entirely invented materials) effectively references the interaction of the physical world with our projections onto it. As the sound of a thunderclap is instantaneously incorporated into a dream, so objective and projected worlds interact and combine. Whereas earlier work had dealt separately with mental and physical space, this work operates in the netherworld of their interaction.
