I'm going to discuss three things about the work: why I'm painting out of the rectangle instead of within it (which will really be a brief summary of the formal development), my non-formal relationship to the work, which are some thoughts and feelings jotted down over the years from my journals, and what I think the work has to do with Malevich's Suprematism (subject of my 1982 MFA dissertation which greatly influenced my painting).

I.

To answer the first question I have to go back in time...1980 was the year I finally decided what I really wanted to do was paint. I was doing prints and large paper/canvas constructions prior to that, but I saw the Picasso Retrospective that year and it had a tremendous impact on me. Not just that the paintings were amazing, but it was like seeing every interior aspect of another human being. What struck me was that all the thoughts and feelings were there in the paint. One could even feel the change from youth to old age. This impressed me so much that I decided I was going to do "straight" paintings likewise.

When I first started painting I said I could paint anything I wanted as long as it was within the rectangle. However after four years of this "straight" painting I woke up one morning and realized I had no excitement for going to the studio. It was a drudgery, a chore. I had four large canvases I had been working on for ten months and they were going no where. I hated them. All during the four years I had wanted to put something else on the canvas, build as I painted, to become more physically involved, but I had imposed this limitation of the "straight" painting and only out of absolute necessity was I going to change that. Finally it reached a point where "straight" painting didn't matter to me anymore --- the goal had become to do a "straight" painting which put a real limitation on what the work was about. And it also reached a point where if I added something to the canvas, I knew now exactly why I was doing it.

I had been fooling around with some other little color field paintings next to the big ones. And I noticed when I put the small paintings say on top of a large one, the elements, lines and shapes in the large one suddenly became as real as the small paintings and the small painting sort of hovered in a zone of being a real thing and just an illusory element of the large canvas. I also noticed that the field of the large canvas seemed to start to dissolve, float, become an atmosphere for whatever was painted within it. So there was a reversal going on of what was actually the real thing (stretched canvas and attachment) appearing to be more illusory than those elements that were illusory. I had been trying to do this all along, but now it seemed to have real impact with these added attachments. This was just what I needed because suddenly the paintings seemed to come to life and were activated. I think this feeling of life energy is very important in abstract work because without it the paintings become a "so what". It is possible to get that without building out of the rectangle, but for me it wasn't, not with my temperament. And besides there seems to be a kind of inevitability to the history of things and how was one to ignore what Stella had done with the space of abstract painting? Formally, it seemed a route to continue down (shaped, three-dimensional painting), but perhaps with a different edge.

Anyway, after I decided I could do anything I wanted, it was much better. I don't regret those four years though. In fact, I think it was necessary. I think restraining one's self like that is good, because then when it comes out, its because of necessity and is honest. I remember when I finally made my decision to abandon straight painting, thinking "what does it matter now. I'll never be a painter. No one will ever want to buy or see my work, so I'll do it just for me, so that I'll be happy and excited to go to the studio each morning."

So to answer the first question of why I work out of the rectangle: it is to make the forms and shapes within the rectangle become more real. And it seems to be a way of working for me that is direct, a way I can think about and feel things with the material instead of my head. Some people might find it very distracting to be in the middle of painting and then have to go cut some shape or wrap some wire, but that is how I like to work. I like the variety. I work abstractly because feel closest to my feelings that way. I think it is exactly like composing a piece of music except with color and form.

II.

Now, concerning what I think about when I'm working on a body of work ... I wanted to read a couple of journal entries. It gives a little bit more immediacy as to what my artistic process is like and a more accurate presentation of the personality which I think embodies a dimension of the work.

Journal entry: November 1984 (a couple of months after I had made the decision to work out of the rectangle):

"I think I am almost to or may have reached the point where I can just paint -- although I won't know for sure until I have done a half dozen more paintings. And it does seem like an artist reaches that point and then it only becomes greater and greater and greater, that is if they have an inner vision that is unlike anyone else, which I believe everyone has, but most are unable to tap it, or be like a free channel through which it may flow. It is so difficult not to be uptight or anxious, to be perfectly natural... I don't care what my paintings are, all that matters is how they are painted. There are certain things I love and that is what my painting is about. I'm thinking about my work right now.. what do I like best, what can I say I love about it or love about its potential right now. I like it when certain parts float out from each other and there is a space that exists behind them like thin atmosphere you swear you could put your hands through. I also like these rich beautiful colors that sing out with such clarity, that elicit such a longing, something so beautiful, so perfect that all one can say is ah. That is what I want to be able to do, to do consistently."

Journal entry: January 1984 (11 months prior to other entry but anticipating things going on now)

"My thoughts concerning my art have been so elementary. Simple discoveries carried great profundity, and now they seem so obvious, so assumed. I have many doubts about being an artist, about the value of my paintings and their relationship to our culture and the world we live in. They don't seem contemporary or radical. I don't know what they are. Sometimes I think they are irrelevant. I suppose the question I should ask is: are they relevant to me? They are relevant to me in that they give me some kind of hope, of awe and peace, i.e. when they are well done. They are most definitely a retreat from the world.Yet to me they are images of the world in the most literal of all senses -- the world evicted of everything but is mass and weight, its itness, a tiny pebble in a huge field hurling through space yet never moving. Not all images are that. Some are trying to understand volume. Volume as most akin to that huge cavernous sound that opens in space at some moments when an orchestra is playing. This sound that shows you the infinity of that space before your eyes. And then this leads to that groping desire for that which haunts all the riddles of the universe. Like a low resounding drum beat that hearkens back to the beginning of time, to a kind of savageness that is present in questions there are no answers to ..."

Journal entry: August 1985 (One and a half year later)

"Well, I'm on this tangent of doing my drawings with no thought in mind, only making crude marks, scribbles, until the mind begins to see things, pick things out, impose and order. It seems to operate like a dream And the mind keeps going, trying to make some sense. And only when it can put a name to it or go "ah ha, I know what this is" does it stop. I suppose that's how a certain amount of ridiculousness enters in -- desperately trying to make something out of scribbles, to make something, anything at all that is somehow worthy of attention. But what makes it worthy? The quality of the scribbles in relationship to each other and their lack of pretension? It is a very difficult thing because at no time can I try and make something in particular because as soon as I do, it becomes pretentious. It has to arise of its own accord. The running thread, idea, or plan of action is always to create this image, this dissolution of form and surface, so that the space is always changing and what is foremost can shift to being in the back or a real attachment appears to exist in the atmosphere of the painting, not in front of it. And so this makes the other things seem real and there is a bridge. Out of painting comes the idea, where as preconceived idea equals a design. It becomes a doodle when I'm not all there or am dictating demands."

What I came to realize through this stream of consciousness way of working and longing desire was that each of my paintings has a strange story to it. Most of the stories I can't tell because they're the kind not to be spoken. I did happen to record two stories of two paintings. One is concerned more with the tragic, the other more comic. It gives an idea of how the paintings content level works and how I feel with them.

Journal entry: April 1986

"I should tell you the story of these paintings. The one makes me so sad I cry. When I look at this painting, I feel like someone who is waiting. Waiting for eternity, with a secret, confined, alone. There are many associations with this painting... Why is it so sad? Because there is such a great longing for something. Tragic, because the beauty exists in the desire that can never be. It is like pulling up the last vestiges of life, of hope, someone saved many years and then immortalized it all in a painting -- a feeling that is trapped, destined to burn brightly for eternity. I thought also it is a painting of love and suffering. I don't want to sell it because I will never have a painting like it. I won't be able to feel anything so pure, so intense again: it has captured this moment in time perfectly. It is as if when I look at this painting, the feeling will burn brightly forever and I won't forget where I once was. It is an image of how I feel at this moment in a most sublime sense.
Now, the other painting excites me. It is a rather funny painting and has a really dumb story: Like a dog named Spot goes on a little sail boat ride through flaming bushes in a fake tropical setting, and then there's this whirlpool that goes down and around and suspends everything in space around a key hole that is something, a solid object, not a hole. So one feels a madness like looking through a hole that is dense and solid, that is like the key, not the hole. And so what am I saying? X is given the impossible task of finding the promised land, the fountain of youth, the city of gold, but will be forever searching, going around and round, because there is no hole into the secret chest. (And then it all turned blue, a deep, beautiful blue, in every variation imaginable.)"

A month later in May, 1986, I came across these notes in the newspaper on beauty and sadness and jotted them down as I thought they were interesting. It follows:

"Consciousness itself is a form of sadness. The waiting, the patience of the self, the silent spaces between impulses is where sadness lives. Joy is activity. Beauty has something of the primal scene in it -- a sense of forces beyond our capacity or control. Beauty is perhaps a bittersweet regret that our lives cannot be better than they are."

There is a definite kind of sense on a content level as well as a formal level that evolves in the process of painting. The forms and marks exist as themselves, but also allude to maybe two or three other things, layering the meaning of the painting. Always in this process I find some insight into my life that creates a unity between the piece and myself. I often think of it as a kind of meditation in which one delves into the depths of the mind, which one can think of as either a dive into the unconscious or supra-consciousness.

III.

Now, Malevich, along with a number of early 20c abstract/non-objective painters, was concerned with developing supra-consciousness as a way of ushering in a new age, a new way to feel existence on the basis of a kind of existential sublimation. Suprematism was a theory of pure painting, forms existing as themselves. The general line of thought of his that I found interesting was in regards to his book The World a Non-objectivity, a play of words on Schopenhouer's treatise The World as Will and Representation. Its rather heady and convoluted but essentially goes like this: If there is representation, then there is no world. And if the will exists in order to direct and conduct representation, then it is clear that there is no world but combat. When the will becomes free from directing or conducting representation, i.e. objects, it traces out a pure form of floating and a new freedom of consciousness arises. In this state the painting can become for the spirit a pure expression of its own self-evident creative powers. The painting makes pure sensation real and creates a situation where one, (I think both artist/viewer), exists in a state of active passive receptivity. As I see it, this state of active passive receptivity is the key and is from which one becomes involved in a process of expansion and unification. I think once the will is free form the world of objectivity, it becomes possible to really tap ultimate truths and develop a sort of supra-consciousness. So in terms of a philosophical goal my work is similar to Malevich's and also in the fact that I try to keep a non-objective relationship to the forms I use.

There is a statement from the philosopher Martin Buber's I and Thou that I think gets at the core of the transcendental in art and how art may function as a bridge of sorts. He writes:

"This is the eternal origin of art, that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of of the world, but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. The form that confronts me I cannot experience or describe. I can only actualize it... And it is an actual relation. It acts on me as I act on it. Such a work is creation, inventing is finding, forming is discovery. As I actualize, I uncover. I lead the form across --- into the world of It. The created work is a thing among things and can be described as an aggregate of qualities. But the receptive beholder may be bodily confronted now and again. [The art object] enters into the world of things in order to remain incessantly effection, incessantly It -- but also infinitely able to become again a You, enchanting and inspiring."

The thing I remember so clearly on doing the work on Malevich was his desire for painting to be something in and of itself, actual and active, where one is confronted with the immediacy of another mind. Buber in his discussion goes on: "What then does one experience of the You? -- Nothing at all. For one does not experience it. -- What then does one know of the You? -- only everything. For one no longer knows particulars." Then further on he comments on the notion of presence which is something associated with human terms as opposed to the world of things. He writes: "Presence is not what is evanescent and passes but what confronts us, waiting and enduring." I look at my paintings in terms of presences.

And so that is what my work is about, or some of the things I think about when I step back from painting.