artist's statement

STILL - October 2006
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“Still”, the title of this show, is one of those wonderful words that seems to be rich in the variety of meanings it conjures up – still, the continuation of a state of affairs; still, quiet; still, a contraption that can separate out a concentration from an indiscrete mix.

One of my friends who happened to be a public school teacher once commented that the great days aren’t holidays, the great days are SNOW days. Nothing has been preplanned to fill up that little vacation so the recipient of this gift of a day is free to lounge around, read or just daydream.

When I taught at Westmar College my “snow days” were those days when I had a meeting where I had to drive four or five hours to Des Moines or Iowa City or Minneapolis or someplace else that was wonderfully far away. While everyone else was at work, I was delighting in the wonderful light and dazzled by vast landscapes and endless highways. As I drove, my youth of fishing ponds and riding bikes would pay me fleeting visits. To this day, my best thinking and possibly my most creative mind flourishes while I am driving. Sadly, many of my great thoughts and creative insights seem to dim or evaporate, unarticulated, as soon as I have to rejoin the hustle-bustle of the real world – too conscious of being on stage delivering scripted lines to construct new ideas.

Through reflecting on this kind of experience, a few things became clear. They have influenced the direction my painting has taken. First, in order to think reflectively, work on an idea, or create something I need to achieve an uninterrupted focus. This precondition is almost impossible for most of us to sustain as our everyday lives of work and socializing so relentlessly make claims on our attention. Just as a long drive is like a “snow day” in the way it provides me a situation conducive for thinking creatively, so is working alone in the studio. Fortunately, the studio life usually shields me from interruption and makes almost everyday a “snow day”.

A second thing that became clear was how precarious the parts of a new idea are while they are being formed. Sometime the slightest interruption can seem to collapse all the little connection that are being pulled together into that new revelation like the proverbial house of cards. As I work through a painting I am frequently reminded of that experience we all have on occasion when we awake from a dream that is so vivid, but quickly that vividness fades and we can only remember the barest generalities as we try to describe it. Essentially, my paintings are my way of thinking about, articulating, and hanging onto those ephemeral aspects of atmosphere and place that I have continued to find mesmerizing. Also, they are a means for sharing these connections with others.

This leads me to the idea of “Still” as a concentrating device. In the modern world it seems almost impossible for each individual to find circumstances that encourage both effective collaboration and the reflective solitude necessary to make new discoveries, extend thinking, or even appreciate our circumstance and environment. But, under the best of circumstances extending ideas and insightful thinking might remain precious and rare for most of us if our own thoughts and experiences were not constantly being seeded and informed by observations and thoughts expressed us by others. The act of creating art or literature or music or architecture seems to me to be a distillation process where the artist, writer, composer, architect is the “still” equipped with a multitude of tools and experiences. They are “artfully” applied to that creators elusive and rough idea. During the creative process essential features of the idea are concentrated and connections amplified. Along the way, a kind of alchemy occurs. The resulting creation is a form that can inform, clarify, and move the creator as well as an audience of other people. The significance and beauty seems to be bound up in the object created. But the more profound human gift that flows from this “still” is the potential for many people across time to share in a similar sense of the expression elicited by that creation and to have their experiences subtlety enriched by it.