autobiographical contents

One more institutional affiliation...

ART 383, Life Painting, Cal State Long Beach
My teaching methodology will focus on the material approach favored by Dutch masters like Vermeer, and also include a nod to the more improvisational flourishes of the Italian Tiepolo. Many scholars agree that the European Baroque was a period of intensity, depth and greatness that will remain without equal...this was the high water mark..the medium's one Golden Age. To be fair-we should of course note the 19th century Romantics for the complexity and daring of their vision, and of course the 20th century modernists for pushing the medium to its conceptual limits...but none of these eras could hope to match the supreme level of technical fluency, epic pictorialism, and the breadth of production commonplace during the Baroque. Few artists, if any have approached the mastery, not only of craft, but of the visionary pictorial grandeur that has become so emblematic of artists of the 1600's.

My own representational technique has grown slowly and akwardly, and now employs a liberal use of repeated glazing, semi-wet on semi-wet, and a 4-5 layer process that demands an abundance of patience and studio lingering. This is one of the most difficult things for young painters to grasp..that the process can be tedious and time consuming..that results come slowly, if at all. It's hard to make art with too many distractions. Ask Steve Canaday about that one. I generally disdain canvas surfaces and prefer the smooth panels used by the Northern Europeans and contemporary masters like Glenn Brown. I am not a traditionalist or a "realist" or a Dogmatic Ideologue, nonetheless I recognize the importance of fluency and mastery in this particular lexicon of the visual language-and the reach and breadth that a material craft can bring to the conceptual arsenal an artist employs. Unlike a writer or conceptual artist who may be able to remain distanced behind the slight removal of words and ideas a painter exists immediately and directly within the marks and gestures of their surfaces.

My goal is to paint with great skill if not with complete virtuosity, with an absence of irony-but nonetheless reaching towards a syncretic hybrid form that is at once comfortable with an awareness of the past and the necessity to reconstitute our vision of painting that clearly cannot remain static and entrenched if it wishes to engage in any of the current conversations and remain a relevant cultural form. I see this conversation as a web and a network rather than a Pyramid of Authority rising from the Academic Ocean (see employee id card). There is no Son of Horus, no wrathful Christ as Pantokrator..no God of Judgement...only pockets of value held dearly and with great faith by the members of various scattered communities and hyper specialized sub-cultures. Some of these just happen to have more visibility than others. There are many "artworlds", but the greater entity is a loose and diaphanous communal society, a structure that is constantly morphing and without a center. There are avenues of connectivity but there is no "right" or "wrong". Dollar value is a chimera that occupies the razor thin space between Greed and Fear..."prestige" comes from an obscure Old French word meaning "jugglers tricks". Look it up. In my mind, values and beliefs about art should be mutable..."truth" can be gotten at from many sides. There is no such thing as a correct way of making images, only a plenum of choices. No one is at war in Art, thankfully. As such, an abundance of options will naturally be manifest as an artistic practice with great depth, vision, relevance and agency. Art is both material and immaterial, and I see no problem or contest with these two "oppositional" traits being held by the same artifact concurrently. Both qualities are present within the same object as it passes through our awareness-for this "object" which can be more correctly perceived as a movement of ideas and substances through space, is both infinite and temporal.