I like a painting that does something, like a machine does something: you turn it on and it functions “Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina.…The retinal shudder!” — Marcel Duchamp1 shudder // shutter The click of the shutter, the click of the cliché, but lets come back to that […]

Engagement, baby’s mittens Engagement, baby’s mittens, ocean floor, Palermo rose, Lake Tahoe, timid white, Iguana green, blue echo, sycamore, Unspoken love, dark lilac, nighty night. Tomato tango, tint of mint, rustique, Petunia, modern romance, wild mush- Room, vintage claret, Celtic folklore, week- End get-away, alfresco, royal flush. Plum martini, Oklahoma wheat; Confetti, evening skyline, sun-kissed […]

Whereas I feel the photographs have a propensity to document, the paintings have no such obligation and as such they use the information in the photographs quite freely and make whatever is needed of the images. There is much re-drawing of the space, re-articulating, such as stepping back to get a slightly more distant view, […]

I had never before or after felt this anxiety so intensely. The jump would mean letting go of that precious section and I would have to TRUST that something else would appear — and that something would resolve and complete the painting. Brenda Goodman, Breakthrough, 1985, oil on canvas, 60 x 84 in. All images: […]

I sat on the bed and placed a canvas on the windowsill and made my first painting in America. My earliest paintings in New York, were kind of the extension of what I was doing in Tokyo, but with limited material: one small brush and five tubes of cheap oil paint. From there, over a […]

I have always been concerned with meaning, allusion and narrative – something outside “pure” painterly concerns. Barnett Newman made great “pure” paintings, but I have always felt that I was made of baser clay. I want to tell a story, even if that story is cryptic or fragmentary. Prior to 2011, the focus of my […]

To aim for a more complete expression of reality is not at odds with abstraction. Reality in abstract painting exists where what is seen impacts the body physically… Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-81 (Phillips Collection, Washington D.C). Included under the fair use exemption. (Click to enlarge) Renoir’s vision for painting was as […]

“…[M]y work has always been concerned with a physical relationship with the body and how the body negotiates the world and receives a painting – through movement,” Joan Waltemath said in conversation with painter Gordon Moore. Joan Waltemath’s paintings and drawings proceed from a deep understanding of how the body engages art—how their surfaces trigger […]

It doesn’t matter if it is painting, sculpture, drawing or photography. They all unravel in time. The work is about temporality and ways to relate to it. A durational temporality that is exposed to light. Nazafarin Lotfi, papier-mâché and wood, 2015. © Nazafarin Lotfi. Courtesy of the artist. I am drawn to sculpture as a […]

The more successful paintings for me are the ones in which the figure-ground relationship is less stable; your eye can’t completely fix on a specific area, and the surface is in constant flux. For me it keeps the painting from becoming too easily read. The work of painter Patrick Burns is elegant and seductive with […]