Like Niagara Falls (last post with text)

8" x 10", oil on panel

Peter Schjeldal, art critic for the New Yorker, said in a lecture to students that artists do not need to write artist's statements. Art business often requires it but his opinion is that they do not always have anything to do with the work. I remember being discouraged from attaching words to my paintings in graduate school because words are so limiting.* I love talking about art but I love making it and looking at it more, much more. I've had the experience of reading something and having the text expand my understanding of a particular artwork or artist. In Art Weekly I have tried to offer that kind of insight into my work and the work of other painters. The writing is, at times, too elementary for those who in the field yet can be still to esoteric for the lay person.

The iPad Project is very freeing in that I post it, sharing it with others, and everything I want to express is in the picture. I'm not obligated to verbally expand or qualify. I'm done. It's been fifteen years since I graduated Penn with my MFA and I've painted through a lot of territory. I haven't scratched the surface of ideas I want to dig up and haven't reached the bottom of the well of ideas I have already unearthed. I know where my strengths are. I suck in math and I have a huge imagination. I am committed to being stylistically flexible when the art world wants to label, define, and categorize for collection. I'm forty. It's said that after forty people are more confident about their identity and just don't give a shit anymore. I've had a good time with the blog. It's very important to me. I see it as an artwork on its own. There's plenty to go back and read if someone is looking for explanation. If I really feel the need to write about something, I can, but I'm shaking off the need to plead with people to look. Now it's going to be purely visual. We'll see what happens.

Here's my new motto:

"I'm this and I'm also that."

*Ineffability is concerned with ideas that cannot or should not be expressed in spoken words (or language in general), often being in the form of a taboo or incomprehensible term. This property is commonly associated with philosophy, aspects of existence, and similar concepts that are inherently "too great", complex, or abstract to be adequately communicated. In addition, illogical statements, principles, reasons, and arguments are intrinsically ineffable along withimpossibilities, contradictions, and paradoxes. Terminology describing the nature of experience cannot be properly conveyed in dualistic symbolic language; it is believed that this knowledge is only held by the individual from which it originates. Profanity and vulgarisms can easily and clearly be stated, but by those who consider they should not be said, they are considered ineffable. Thus, one method of describing something that is ineffable is by using apophasis, i.e. describing what it is not, rather than what it is. - Wikipedia