I moved out to New Mexico from Madison, Wisconsin in 1978 to attend graduate shcool. At that time I discovered the cubist poems from "Tender Buttons" by Gertrude Stein and the work of Kasmir Malevich, an early 20c Russian non-objective painter. Then in 1980 I saw the Picasso retrospective. The conceptual influence of Stein and Malevich oriented me in a certain direction so that when I saw the Picasso retrospective, I was so stunned that one could see everything that the man thought and felt -- his whole life in his paintings, that I decided I wanted to try this myself and become a painter.

I'd like to read you a poem, "A Dog" by Stein because it basically sums up in language what I'm trying to do in paint. It goes like this:

A Dog

A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.

In Lectures to America, Stein writes:

"And then something happened and I began to discover the names of things, that is not discover the names but discover the things the things to see the things to look at and in so doing I had of course to name them not to give them new names but to see that I could find out how to know that they were there by their names... having begun looking at them I called them by their names with passion and that made poetry."

This thought of looking beyond the assumption of appearance has had lasting impact in my work, and the fact that in Stein's writing it was primarily the weight, speed, direction of the words themselves, apart from their particular representation, that expressed the essence of the entity utterly amazed me. If translated into paint, I didn't think Gertrude Steins cubist poems would necessarily look like a Picasso cubist painting -- somehow they seemed even more abstract, non-objective and absurd.

The second coneptual influence for me, Malevich, linked art, constructions, non-objectivity with spiritual consciousness and awakening awareness to that which is inner to life. He believed art is primarily a form of speculative thinking that strives to attain absolute perfection, i.e. God, and the comprehension of God as perfection becomes one's prime objective. The production of forms have purpose and meaning only as they represent steps toward a wisdom greater than one's waking consciousness. Always each thing is not yet God but going towards God. What I found especially exciting was that he perceived all human senses as leading to this cosmic consciousness but rather than being guided by sense, as in precise thought, the senses were crowned by senselessness. Higher consciousness was not something to be directed, controlled by the will but was to be achieved precisely by letting go of the will. Malevich purported that 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. This was important to me because here painting was a metaphysical act concerned with the renewal of meaning rather than emptiness.

In my work the paintings become involved in the naming of things from/of this world in a way that hopefully hasn't been thought of before. I begin by drawing a feeling I have, sometimes there is a non-objective image in my mind, which usually starts with a movement sensation expressed in line which goes into form . All the drawings are in black and white, worked additively and subtractively. In my mind I can't see the details, only the feeling is there, the drawing makes things more clear but I am usually unable to name the drawings. The paintings are what actually bring the idea into the world of it. I find that the attachments to and projections from the picture plane intensify the painting's "itness" and are necessary in making them seem real -- otherwise they remain too much a figment of the imagination. I recently jotted this down concerning my working method:

Each painting has its own logic -- one has to listen very carefully to what the painting is saying -- that is the hard part --- not to try to impose one's preconceptions. This is ironic when one thinks one starts with a plan, a preconception, and yet one must not keep an attitude of imposing it and yet one cannot stray from this feeling of the initial impetus or vision. This is a very hard thing to do. It takes much time, patience, clarity. One must be very calm, desiring nothing, doing only for the sake of doing, to do it the very best one can do. It is a very intriguing process because as one works, one finds oneself asking: What is this? Why am I painting this? Does it mean anything or is it just a wall decoration? But if one can feel the paintings "spirit," even if it feels overtly sentimental, trite, or insignificant, and find something to love in it, and bring that forth, then it turns out all right. The art has to be something absorbing, engrossing, challenging enough so that for a while time stops and I am away from all my petty worries about living and dying.

When the paintings are finished what they symbolize is not just a new presentation of a thing but also the struggle of consciousness to make some kind of sense on a cosmic level. The paintings exist as questions and/or meditations. The process of looking at them as well as working on them, is based on free association and the power of suggestion. I think of them as mind probes as well as presences.