The paintings in this post are mostly from the 1980s. They are also the beginning of this serious trend I got into with what you could call "hard edge" approach. I have been chasing down this idea since the 60s: "Nothing is permanent." I taught a class in painting on canvas back in '76. I called it "Psyche Art." Right, I know; talk about zingers. Simply put: Art (including visual art) happens in the mind (psyche). What may mean one thing for one person may mean an entirely different thing for another. "Objects" in paintings are made from: edges, colors, textures, shapes, blending - all that mechanical stuff that paintings do. You turn off the lights however, and for a painting, it may as well cease to exist. Close your eyes and touch a painting; not much to write home about.
"Mary's Purple Painting" acrylic on canvas - 1981 - approx. 30" x 30"
Assuming the lights are on; you can take the elements: edges, colors, textures, shapes, blending, and apply them to ANY visual art. Abstract, architectural, portrait, landscape, whatever. Those elements allow for the visual space around us. The question I'm chasing down in all of this is: What happens when you loose all your handles? A chair is a chair because we see it, we call it that, and everyone agrees to that. But, there is no name for the meaningless space inside the legs, under the seat. A normal person would rightfully ask - "Who gives a sh*t what the space is under the chair?" I agree. That doesn't mean - it doesn't exist! Does a tree falling in the forest, with no one around to hear it; make a noise? It doesn't matter. Neither does an object in a painting matter as far as the mind is concerned. It is what we perceive" it to be, providing we know what we're looking at. Without being a chair, the colors and lines would be chaos. If you rotate the canvas and look into different areas of the chaos, you may "see" an accident. .
"Boxes Run" acrylic on canvas - 1984 - approx. 40" x 42"
We agree to a world from birth. We agree that red is red. Apples can be red. We agree that some apples can be green; and so on. We share visual space, but from only "one" perspective - the "I" perspective. This is all assuming that you are not color-blind or blind altogether in which case all this would be meaningless. When I try to take in the visual world - I trust my eyes in this process. What if: what you thought was an "object" in a painting gets covered over and you can't see it anymore? You have to look elsewhere for another object "handle" (chair).
"August '82" acrylic on canvas - 1982 - 36" x 50"
We like to label things. These paintings explore breaking things. Tearing an object apart (paint over it) to see what gets left behind. And I always tell the students in the class. If you absolutely, positively, cannot live with yourself, if you paint over the little happy accident you discovered in your painting - then take a picture of it, or make it a second painting, but "kill" the original. I have had people tell me the word "kill" is too much for what happens here. I could instead say: remove, erase, cover-up, take away. I use the word "kill."
"Meander" acrylic on canvas - 1982 - 42" x 44"
It has no chance of "life" anymore. It cannot influence the rest of the painting anymore. It's only contribution now is that it is not in the way of the rest (which would not have come into being otherwise). The reason I go through this with students is so they experience that "ego death." That letting go. That willingness to sacrifice the 'one for the many.' "Psyche art" was an appropriate name for this stuff in that it deals directly with the mind of the painter. Before; it was in the mind of the audience. But "Psyche" is just too hot of a word.
"Watchtower" acrylic on canvas - 1982 - 42" x 42"
In the one above ("Watchtower"), I stuck the "recognizable" spiral staircase in there for people who needed an "object." I don't think it works very well, but I made my point. The stuff going on around is up to interpretation. I did a few paintings where I stuck disparate elements on top of each other.
For me I guess these hard-edge paintings are "boundary testers" - colors against colors, shapes against shapes, light and darkness, all that stuff that makes any painting. The spin-off of doing this is that entirely new and unplanned things happen. There can be something new everytime I look at these, even for me, and I made them. How can something grow old if you don't know what it is? By the way: All this writing is what you do in art history classes - theorizing - philosophizing. I don't consider these "abstract" necessarily. Because they have fixed lines they could be called "concrete" as in "concrete irrationality" - which is what Salvadore Dali had flying around in a lot of his paintings. There are no intentional "objects" so they are "non"-objective. They could be called "concrete non-objectivity" which ain't gonna fly.
So what I've come to think of them for myself is: quantum painting. Quantum, in that consciousness defines reality. I don't pretend to have the mind enough to understand quantum mechanics. But I understand infinite possibilities and that consciousness is key in there. The reason I don't call the later stuff hard-edge is because there is no masking tape (edges) work involved. I guess from 2000 on it was all either brush, or palette knife. Labeling this stuff is fun but maybe pointless. In the end they have to stand on their own whatever they are.
I'll post more as I find them.
