Any profound and lasting understanding of art and its history, is achieved by reading its materials, techniques, and ideas.
“How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” Like Nina Simone, I take on politics in my art.
As a child, I hung around Jackson Square, pestering the painters as they worked at their easels capturing street life, about what and how to paint. After cutting my teeth on French Quarter images, I moved on, though not too far, to do paintings about social issues, some early subjects: prostitutes in the French Quarter, and lines of people waiting to see Blaxploitation films.
Strokes, paintbrush strokes, are the residue of an act, its shadow, and a frozen testament of rhythm, and emotion. In Abstract painting- especially American Abstract Expressionist Painting, the subject matter is the material itself, and how it is used to produce a painting. That is it. The concept is exclusively about painting. Conceptual Art places the Idea, above the material.
Materials used to make art, have a history of use and value in society; when used to make a painting, these materials have a specific use and value that make up a large part of the history of painting, and art history. The Support/Surface movement questions all of the product that we call a painting, and eventually, questions painting itself. Thus, the looking behind, and beyond that product, i.e. rethinking what, how, why is painting.
_________________________________________________
My concept of Painting is to simultaneously use the Idea as Material, and the Material as Idea.
The Idea, for example, racism, a blues song, a Platonic dialogue, sexuality, is used as concretely as possible as matter, as subject, matter. The Idea is not simply represented on the surface, but permeates the canvas, the paint, all of the materials used to construct the product we call a painting. What do ideas like, racism, blues, a Platonic dialogue, sexuality, have to do with painting, that is, with oil paint, cotton, turpentine, gesso, and strokes? For one example, take the Idea, Racism: some manifestations of that Idea, were the Material products, cotton, turpentine, and strokes.
The Material, paint, canvas, brushstrokes, etc., is used as Idea. Canvas is produced from cotton, paints from oil, and turpentine from trees. These products and the raw materials, from which they are produced, are permeated with, and encompassed by, Ideas (even memories) and saturated with historical traces. Again, the Idea of Racism: cotton was picked by slaves, and “Turpentine trees” (Pines) were used for lynching– Slaves and lynching being both products of the Idea of Racism.
My work deals with historical traces. It is a History, of Ideas, and of the painting Materials. They meet on the canvas, and the result is a new concept: the product of the tension, rawness, and beauty of the inextricable whirl of ideas and the sensual in Painting.