Returning to the “artist statement”

All This Way, 8” x 8”, 2021

For the first time in a very long time, I have an exhibition of sorts. My drawings and paintings will be on exhibit at The Art Base in Basalt, Colorado, in December. The curator of the exhibition, Katherine Grey Walker, asked me to provide an artist statement.

An artist statement.

I haven’t written one of those in a very long time.

In an earlier version of my life, my artist statement was a central aspect of my creative practice. It’s a mission statement, a statement of intent. In my twenties I had very ambitious artist statements that connected my work to complex conceptual and cultural phenomena.

Over time, I’ve lost interest in those statements. Being inclined to write, I think my artist statements were always engaging as texts in and of themselves. But I think they also added layers of conceptual framing that were overwrought, and that actually burdened my creative process. I was primarily a painter, but if you read my statement you’d think I was doing cultural anthropology, or developmental psychology.

After receiving my MFA in 2009, I continued to draw and to paint, but I also quietly let myself slide into obscurity in relation to my peers. I was intent on studying yoga, and something about me didn’t fit right in the churn of the intellectual art world. I felt I was trying too hard. It was also just a gut thing; sometimes you know when you’re in the wrong place.

So I kept making work, in stutters and spurts, and I abandoned the artist statement at some point. I haven’t missed it much. In its absence, I’ve been really trying to let myself make exactly what I want to make, and to not allow prior framing to contain the pulse of inspiration. Inspiration is, fascinatingly, something of a taboo concept in art school, at least in my experience. We use more of a research model. Inspiration has always driven my practice, but over time I got very good at pretending it didn’t. And that might be a primary reason that I’ve had so much trouble with creative flow. I’ve been repressing the current.

So, having been practicing a more non-conceptual approach to making, it was interesting to consider the request from Katherine. I needed an artist statement today, and I haven’t written one in years. So I wrote something this afternoon, and I haven’t had much time to consider how well it suits me. Nonetheless, I’m feeling good about sharing it with my practice community. Here’s what I came up with:

The journey of my practice is one of moving from the outside in. In my twenties I attempted to construct a complex conceptual framework within which to paint — a critique of the suburban world that birthed me — and it was met with moderate success. It felt like a tremendous labor to make work this way, and it took me a decade or so to realize that I didn’t actually feel strongly about it. Over time, I’ve surrendered to the fact that my motivations for painting are much less intellectual. I receive inspiration, and I respond to it. The initial pulse might come in the form of a striking vision, either of something in my immediate surroundings, or an internal image, something like a visual daydream. Often the initial pulse is language, and that might drive me to poetry and essay. As the inspiration meets a material process, it is transformed, in the way a dream explained is hardly the dream. I consider a piece to be finished when I find it satisfying. I have no idea how other people will receive the work, no way to assess whether something I’ve made is “good” or “bad.” I’ve been working on letting that go, and allowing my sense of internal satisfaction determine whether the work is finished. Over time, what I make is getting simpler. There is less critique and more reverence. Many of the works on display here have to do with the majesty of mountains and the ache of grief.