It is my belief that life has a kind of profligacy in creation that precedes and perhaps overwhelms our attempts to make sense of it. In a similar way my work’s diversity can be baffling, even to me, and for years I sought to tame my more divergent impulses, striving for greater consistency. As an older painter I choose now to give myself the freedom to do whatever I want—to embrace a diversity of subjects, styles and modes of painting. Like Pirandello’s characters, I see my paintings in search of a metanarrative to which they all belong, although a better analogy might be that they create that metanarrative, one picture at a time, as they come into being. This refusal to settle into an “authentic” style makes my work postmodern I suppose, but I am not interested in “quoting” or in pastiche. All of these differences in the work have different meanings and that is why I use them. And perhaps more importantly, they mirror a self and a world which seem inherently multiform. In that way, they are more true than any outwardly imposed consistency.
Nonetheless certain themes keep repeating themselves, chief among them the journey of the self and society toward real wholeness both physical and spiritual, and the multitude of elements that impede that progress. This is framed within a historical awareness that looks back to the collapse of 20th century utopian thought and ahead to our environmentally-threatened future. I believe we must embrace a more pragmatic utopianism which accepts the messiness of existence rather than always attempting to smooth it over. In art that means a rejection of ideological purity (Clement Greenberg’s cult of non-referential abstraction) and an embrace of whatever tools are to hand: representation and abstraction, found images and imagined ones, hard edges and blurred ones. These various modes of communication mirror a world of multiple value systems and all the tensions this complexity creates—tensions which addressed rightly might drive our future progress.