1980

Following the paper paintings, I made these large oil paintings. In those days it seemed everything needed to be large if you really wanted to mean it.

We used to talk of a painting as a shield that one held like a knight, on ones forearm as an identity.





There seemed also an elemental magic in the way the forms reversed.





I used to say "like the clap of ones hands, There! at the surface" That was the yellow and red surface, the, as I've said most recently, the Here Now!





I then dove into the space of painting looking for Mythic form, not sure what that was. I read about automatic writing and such, of the surrealists and of the Mythic that Pollock, Newman, Gottlieb, and Rothko, all of the Abstract Expressionists were interested in at first before the form itself took over as the discovery.





I didnt really believe in the automatism as the forms took on the form of what ever one was looking at culturally.

The juxtaposition of Surface and Depth, in shield and the field, is the oldest of my forms I still employ.