A.

I've long been interested in the relationship between the way paintings are presented and the way they are perceived. A painting or a body of work may be seen as exquisitely excellent at one moment to one audience, and negative or indifferent under different circumstances, before different people. To say this in Artspeak: context is paramount. To say this in Marketspeak: sell it, and it will be celebrated. An artist may paint for his own reasons, but to ignore the circumstances of presentation is to abandon all possibility of his personal structure of taste becoming a framework of fashion, which is the ultimate unifying social achievement to which any artist can aspire. Therefore, my paintings appear before you only in the most distinguished galleries and museums, executed by an individual of reassuring experience, maturity, and gravitas, with notable honors and a certain gilded art-world luminosity, and yet not without a definite working-class, down-home accessibility. There should be no major impediment to the deep appreciation of this art.

B.

There are four stages of seeing a painting. The first is initial impact. A painting draws you to itself with a visceral charge, not necessarily bold or flamboyant, that can't be ignored. If a painting doesn't succeed in initial impact, not much else will matter. The second stage is analysis, where the viewer studies the work to search out both what it has to offer and how it achieves its ends. The third stage is reflection, where the meaning, if any, of the work comes to be understood. It is at this stage where the deepest communication between the artist and the audience takes place. The fourth stage is memory, a sort of afterglow, where the painting has actually implanted itself in the viewer's consciousness and become a part of his own set of perceptions. A lot of very fine paintings have virtually no afterglow.

C.

These works are a result of a lifetime search for a universal canon of taste in painting. Painting, as a performance of the hand and eye, has always evoked certain expectations from its audience, which through the possibilities of the craft and the needs of civilization, have winnowed out particular observational genres. The main large historical genres are: Figures, Landscapes, and Still Lifes. People, places and things. The twentieth century has added a couple of genres which are, in ways, somewhat theoretical amplifications of the three classics. These are Abstracts: non-representational, supposedly purely formal paintings; and Media: paintings adopting the flow of information, as in collage and in appropriated images. All these generic categories are inevitable, because something inherent in the human experience demands them from handmade visual presentations. If something looks a little like a human figure, it will be read as such, and human qualities will be sought. If something looks like a gun or a car, it will be compared to the viewer's experience of these things. And if a painting looks at all like a landscape, it will be entered and wandered. Collage, abstract and combined approaches may be a little more complex, but still tend to be interpreted in simple ways, especially at the point of initial impact. I am more interested in playing with the psychology of the viewer's perceptions than with merely "expressing myself". So, I am starting from an assumption that there are certain expectations of what a painting can be that I can fulfill.

D.

Beginning with (perhaps) the Bauhaus, and continuing at least through the Seventies, the entire assumption of art as a separate, somewhat sacred enterprise, has been called into question. In particular, the need for activities like painting and sculpture as distinct artistic practices, with their own hegemony of taste, has been examined. Conceptual and performance art arrived as a part of that quest, and at times was explored when there was a dearth of interest or opportunity to show more traditional forms.

I have studied with a number of masters of performance/conceptual art. Sometimes, Fine Art does seem to function as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Global Popular Entertainment, Inc., a division of American Enforced Information. And sometimes stepping outside any framework or constraint, to indulge in pure psycho-theater, seems to be all that will be left to us, if we want to say anything. Therefore, my painting may be an elaborate performance, whereby I assume the smock and beret of Jimmy Jalapeeno, and step up to the easel, and seem to paint, la-de-da-de-da, in the manner ancient, producing paintings, which are shown as paintings have always been shown, to be taken home by patrons, and marveled at by critics. And perhaps it is the committed act which has significance. Or not.

E.

About the nudes. A year ago, I was offered a spot in a group show of nude paintings and drawings. I hadn't done much with nudes for several years, so it was an opportunity to renew my skills in that area. Looking for nude images to make drawings from, and hoping (truthfully!) to find some reasonably non-offensive material, I viewed some pornographic websites. I found a stream of images in these sites that were compelling in a great many ways. You hear a great deal about the decadence of society, and the role that the hyper-sexualization of information and media plays in that decadence. But the images in that great forbidden tide of smut, especially on the www, are still after all pictures of people. They are not demons, nor robots, nor animals. They are presenting a reflection of their own personae, and many of the images are much more complex than simple mechanisms of prurience. Their lives and their experiences are transmitted along with their own semiotics of eroticism. And, the interpretations of what constitutes the erotic may be as telling an expression of an individual life as could be imagined. Certainly these persons, these models, are not just ordinary people. They have chosen a dangerous, stigmatized path. You could call them courageous, or mad, or stupid. But many people, I'm afraid, will be happy just to call them depraved.

So these are my interpretations of these images of all these depraved women. I chose only those pictures which show individuals in the more polite stances of erotic offerings, avoiding the more mechanical and extreme. It would seem to me that in comfortable displays of nudity, the poses and attitudes are represented in a set of positionings that has stayed common from antiquity. There are only so many ways you can show yourself off with any degree of dignity, and they have been explored in classical art, in the Renaissance, in the Baroque, in the Romantic, in the life drawing classes I had as a students and on the www. I would have been pleased to do some male nudes in this project, but I was unable to find websites that offered images that presented nude males in any way that portrayed them simply as real people in beautiful bodies. The male sites seem to be exclusively interested in representations of activities rather than of individuals. Paintings of those images, or of the more engaged images of female sexual activity, would not have much hope of being read in the way I want these paintings to be. I'm exercising taste here, but not moral judgement. It's just that when one turns away from merely a sexual presence to a sexual act, there is no longer much need or effort at communication of self. An image of actual sexual satisfaction may generate such a strong signal of prurience that little else can be conveyed.

I have, then, my prudery, but just at what many might regard a rather low threshold. These paintings are meant to be fairly honest and truthful interpretations of photographs of a great variety of unclad women being sexual. Some of them are shy. Some of them are not a bit shy. Some of them are very much in control of the situation (and run their own websites). Some of them are not so sure of why they are there, in that moment of reality. Some are exquisitely beautiful, some are not. Some are in expensive hotel rooms, or well-appointed kitchens. Some are in their college dorm, or outdoors somewhere. Some are conveying many generations of cultural conditioning, either as practice or as rejection. Some are just having fun. And some are evidently not having much fun. In re-reading Kenneth Clark's The Nude, a study in ideal form, I am finding again what many have celebrated in that work, the all-important distinction between the Nude and the merely Naked. I am confronted again, as I have been in the past, with a realization about my work, and myself I am probably not capable of idealizing much of anything. Or, I would like to think, I find something so sublime in the ordinary and the real (if I could only convey it) that I don't recognize any call to go beyond. That is almost certainly what will trouble a great many people about these works. An honest and truthful landscape is consensually palatable, but an honest image of a real person, painted yet, might be troubling. These may not be nudes at all, but just buck-naked women. And there should be nothing startling about it, because it is nothing new. I am going down the path, though not in their league, that Manet and Eakins followed. Human life, the human story and the human machine, are capable of being looked at unflinchingly. Beauty is real.

F.

About the landscapes: this has been a prime area of exploration for me. No subject matter presents more of a technical challenge. And there is nothing more worthwhile to depict than views of the home planet. The most difficult part of it is the acute rendering of discrete detail and textures, as in foliage, geology, water, etc. The rhythm and feel of such stuff has to be transmitted, without showing every leaf or pebble. Because if you try to show too much, it just goes gray. You have to suggest the detail, and let the mind of the viewer fill in. Some people think my landscapes are really detailed, but look closely.

G.

About the still lifes: I have tried a number of approaches. Some of them are images of objects seeking their own geometrical relationships, a standard practice. Some of them have more of a sense of the "life of the still". And the Chamberlin series, based on details of the John Chamberlin sculptures in the Chinati Foundation collection in Marfa, are both an homage and a study in pure abstraction.

H.

Many years ago, at a garage book sale, I found a sort of self-help paperback entitled, Don't Get Taught Art This Way, As So Many People Do, by Theodore L. Shaw. I remember the passionate message it carried, which is essentially this: the only negative quality a work of art can be accused of is the inducement of fatigue. That's it. If a work of art makes you tired, it's no good. If it seems to take away your fatigue, it's good. There were considerable elaborations and demonstrations of the point, but the purity of the argument was not compromised. Through the consumption of zillions of works of art throughout my life since then, I have not been able to contradict this simple observation. Can you? I mean, without making me tired?

I.

Paintings should show things. A natural response to a painting is to see it as a revelation of a piece of a continuing universe. Even if a painting is far from resembling nature, it may operate as a made-over reality. Reality, that is, which is commented, edited, fantasized, or replaced. A brick on a sidewalk might not be remarkable, but a painting of it very well could be. And by recalling and illuminating the space and light and colors of the brick, the (an) entire cosmos is implicated and implied in the moment of the brick's appearance. Painting should show everything.