Let what you start finish
With each of these, I’m providing commentary related to what I’m doing and thinking about, but my intent is that all of that should be extraneous, none of it necessary to appreciating a given painting. I definitely have my influences and intentions, and a deep dive into the inner workings can be gratifying in its own way, but outside of the rare exception, I’m not in the room when you are establishing whatever relationship you have with my work. It has to make the case on its own, like produce at the supermarket.
You look over a display of peppers or pears, or cheeses, and make your selections or skip the whole lot based on color, texture, smell, the lack or presence of blemishes, firmness or give, weight, general preference. But it isn’t like you’re calculating comparative averages. It’s more like a vibration, a resonance, or conversely, a dissonance. Your choices arise from the consequences of experience layered over instinctual imperatives for attraction and revulsion. The decisions I make when I paint have more to do with the factors that contribute to selecting good produce than with any type of academic agenda or conceptual stratagem. My hope is that the same mechanisms are stimulated in the viewer without the need for a preexisting understanding of trends in art history.