Artists' Statement

My artistic strong suit has always been in handling the human figure. And even though for the last century or so artists and art lovers have tended to prefer the emotion of the brush stroke and pigment over the articulation of the line (as they say, “there are no lines in nature”), this articulation is as important to me as the emotion generated by the paint itself. Indeed, I consider myself a follower of what I call the “violin string” tradition of drawing, that tradition where the draftsman’s lines suggest the stings and possibly music of a violin, a tradition stretching back at least to the time of Ingres. In any event, I try to portray figures that are intelligible and actually seem to exist in the pictorial space of the canvas.

    Many years ago I was taken by the Comedy of Art, and have worked from it ever since. A friend complained about this. “No body even knows what it is,” he said. In 1999 I made a major effort to show my work, and managed six exhibitions, a personal single season record. At that time the Onion was still in town. One day my friend handed me a copy of the latest issue and said, “See, what did tell you?” Sure enough, on the front page were the results of a survey that consisted of one question: “Who is your favorite Comedy of Art character?” Even though about a dozen characters were listed, each had 0% by its name. The last choice was: “I don’t know.” It received 100%. Although I can’t prove it, I tell people I may once have been responsible for an item in the Onion.

    A couple of years ago I was asked to give a talk about my work. At the time I had been painting seriously for 33 years, but it was the first (and to this point only) time I had been asked to talk about my work. Anyway, I told the Onion story and got a good laugh. But after the talk during a question and answer period a woman confessed that she was part of that 100% that knew nothing about the Comedy, and wanted to know why I persisted in pursuing it. This caught me off guard, so I said the first thing I could think of. I asked her if she knew the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. She said, yes, she did. I then said one of the major themes in the movie pertained to the championing of “lost causes.” I told her that’s what I was trying to do.

    Well, such a response would seem to require some elucidation. In any event, a little reflection permits me to do more justice to the question. So what is it about the Comedy? First of all, the Comedy deals with the happenings of old and well worn characters, for example Harlequin, Columbine, and Pierrot. To depict them necessitates inclusion of narrative elements. Unfortunately, this lies outside the modernist domain. Artists and art critics have long since thrown out the idea of narration in painting (even in literature, it seems). For better or worse, I try to raise the narrative element to a level commensurate with the formal composition.

    But there is still the question, why have I been so taken by the Comedy? I think I have been taken by the Comedy because it seems to refuse to let go of humanistic values. As someone once said: “The masks of Pulcinella and Harlequin will always signify something vital and intense, for they are sculpted by both art and time to a semblance of humanity.” I find that in order to portray pictorially a sense of humanistic values it pays to find an appropriate “ground” for the “figure” portrayed, to find an appropriate emotional space to put the figure into. In short, I am not keen on that ruling modernist idea that an art work is just an object – an “object-in-itself” where there is an unfortunate tendency for the whole to be less than the sum of its parts because the object has no necessary relation with anything whatsoever. Rather than use the two-dimensional space so favored during the last century, I generally make use of what is sometimes called oblique two-point perspective: figures and scenes and incidents are portrayed at an oblique angle, with perspective lines receding to the opposite ends of the horizon line rather than to a single point. Although this violates one of the most fundamental rules of the “formalist” aesthetic that have dominated art for the last couple of generations, it tends to open up space and facilitate a sense of narration. As a friend of mine said, “You make paintings for people who read.”

    I have touched on a number of so-called “lost causes”: the notion that line can be as important as the pigment (in an age where painting often signifies color: “shape the picture from the color,” says the rule); that narration is a legitimate focus of painting (in an age when the subject is the object); that perspective is a legitimate tool for creating composition and emotional space (in an age where the composition is supposed to be as flat as the canvas); that humanism is a real value (in an age where the intelligible human figure has long since dropped out of painting). It is my considered judgment that to try to tell a small part of the tale of the Commedia dell’Arte, especially when using the above techniques and ideas, is a worthy endeavor. There ought to be room today for artists who fail to fit into the modernist straightjacket.