Artist’s Statement
Why do I do three-dimensional paintings? I asked some time ago why painting is restricted to a rectangular shape. This format began as the space-box of the Renaissance - a window through which one could see the ‘real’ world in three-dimensional perspective. Representational painting has thrown off many conventions in the modern period, but the rectangular one remains. Why not reshape the space box into whatever shape one wishes?
Almost immediately, the next question arises - then why restrict oneself to two-dimensionality? This is another convention dating from the Renaissance, from the window space-box. Why can painting not grow physically outward as well as irregularly on the flat plane?
Then there is color. All sculpture in the ancient world, as well as much medieval sculpture, was painted in full color (as was all architecture). Sculpture was an art of the painter as well as the sculptor. It was first in the Renaissance - that time again - when ancient sculptures were dug up in a bleached state (the paint having worn away), that artists believed the ancients had left their finished stone sculptures unpainted. So another convention began in the Renaissance - at the very time that painting became restricted to the rectangular space-box, sculpture became colorless and detached from painting. Relief sculpture declined and almost disappeared, and almost all sculpture became in-the-round - a highlighted and isolated experience divorced from the building in which it was housed. So both painting and sculpture at the same became detached from architecture.
But since we are now in an essentially medieval period again (this will be the subject of another essay), painting and sculpture are uniting and themselves becoming reunited with architecure. This is why it is important to me to paint three-dimensionally now.
The three-dimensional painting, or sculpture-painting, gesturing toward and away from the wall in its quest to be reunited with the building at the proper scale, renders obsolete the window space-box through which one sees another reality. It brings reality off the wall, toward the viewer. It wants to be organically unified with the architecture. As compared with rectangular flat paintings, a work of mine shown in the Guggenheim Museum will, through its visual movement and engagement with the wall and the space of the building, look as if it belongs, which flat paintings do not, as has been remarked many times.
Though sculptural concerns are important to me, I essentially still see my works as paintings. This means they have grown out of painting and not sculpture. They have adapted sculptural form out of necessity, not because of any desire to make sculpture, and they retain many of the concerns and conventions of the painting. In particular, landscape is a subject almost never explored by representational sculpture. To me landscape is very important in depicting our time, especially the conflict between man-made civilization and nature, and is a principal subject.
This conflict has been been conveyed by photography, especially cinema, but photography can never really effectively convey the natural world because it is flat and weightless. The very word film is ironically descriptive of the weightless, washed-out and thin affect of photography, which removes the form, mass and weight from nature. Conveying this monumental physical mass and weight to the viewer has always been one of the purposes of painting, and is the reason why sometimes one feels a painting as a weight in the gut, as it were. This is true even of flat painting which would seem to lack any weight, such as Egyptian wall paintings.
Because my work is still essentially painting, but has to exist as sculpture, it poses new problems. A painting has a vantage point; but a painting-sculpture? It has multiple vantage points, interestingly enough recasting an aspect of Cezanne's work with its several vanishing points.
Yet there is beyond this a further challenge in somehow restoring to a sculptural painting a fixed vantage point, as in a traditional landscape painting; but at the same time taking advantage of the physical three-dimensionality of the work, relaxing the single vantage point somewhat and suggesting other possible views. Perhaps only peripherally or out of the corner of one's eye, or perhaps as seen by another actor in a drama.
Next, in a three dimensional landscape, where are the edges or boundaries? The moment the painter agrees to dispense with the window frame, the shapes of the edges of the painting can to some extent be determined by the subject matter, whether a hill, a tree, a street or a building. I see the problem here as having to unify two opposites: the painting-sculpture must be a complete composition but at the same time must be essentially open, expressive of the apparent endessness of the universe in which we live. The fragmentary quality of the edges contributes to this feeling. And the landscape must be in motion. The earth is in a combination of many motions, in the solar system and following the sun around the galaxy in a complex pattern. On highways I often seem to feel the movement of the earth as I hurtle through the landscape.
Part of my subject matter is also the huge engineering megastructure on which our society is based, interwoven with whatever of the natural landscape we permit to be part of our towns and expressway systems, which in suburban areas is considerable.
I am especially drawn to the contrast between swiftly moving vehicles on the highways and the still buildings and trees which sit nearby. I find the contrast can be a metaphor for other things, like the contrast between stability and change in our lives, and the similar contrast between the two in society.
Working with all these ideas at once brings problems, and it is the search to solve all these problems simultaneously and in integration that gives my work its formal purpose. There are many ways that moving flat and three-dimensional areas in one work can be related to each another. There are conventions in flat, shallow-space painting which can be revivified, and there are conventions in sculpture which can also be revivified. Beyond redefining conventions, there are essential new ways that the spaces we see around us can be expressed in a three-dimensional painting. There are indeed many things out there to explore, and in exploring them and solving their associated problems one can define a new representational art, unlike any relief or in-the-round sculpture that has ever existed.