Earlier Art

Most of my art has been concerned with landscape. There might be obvious parallels with traditional Chinese painting or the modern Japanese woodcuts that inspired me early in my career. The truth is that landscape attracted me for its juxtapositions of form.

There is no more complex and dynamic balancing of complex groups of shapes than in nature. Although I explored abstract expressionism and color field painting as a student, I found that landscape allowed me to look into the same themes in a more sophisticated fashion and in a way that stayed vital after those movements seemed to have ended.

Most of my work consciously excludes the human form or any other references to society or civilization. I cannot fully explain why, except to say that including human figures or other references to humanity seemed clichéd and hackneyed to me. Figures seemed to be an expedient shortcut to achieve scale, or an all-too-dangerous temptation to sentimentality. I don’t need to explore those things in my art.

The traditional Chinese landscape with its scholar dwarfed among the grand mountains, the American paintings showing pioneers in the pristine expanse of a new frontier, the contemporary landscape with freeways or high-voltage power lines, or even the ubiquitous seascapes found in motels—none of these are landscape forms that interest me.

What interests me is the landscape as it is, without human emotions, engaged in its own ongoing processes, there to be observed in its form, its play of light and shadow, and the knowledge that it will last long after there are people to observe it.

There may be conflict—there is nothing more violent than the sea crashing against the cliffs or the way upheavals have twisted massive mountains of rock as if they were mere rubber—but it is conflict that has nothing to do with the petty human emotions. Perhaps in some ways I am still painting the landscape as it makes humanity small, only in my case, it is so small as to be out of the frame.

This desire to avoid human emotion dovetailed with my discovery of printmaking. I found that printmaking meant that the gesture of the human hand was sublimated. The accidents and quirks of the hand were smoothed and disciplined by the process itself.

Even in my watercolors, I became interested in large expanses of wash—again trying to get away from the painterly strokes of both the hobbyist painter who has learned to load a brush with several colors to get easy color chords in each stroke, as well as the heroic expressionist battling the canvas with slashing swings of the brush.

The times when I make art are moments completely free of doubt. I am fully engaged in it, connected with something powerful, mysterious, and vital. That some object—a painting or a print—emerges from that process, or that being an artist nowadays requires something akin to producing an identifiable and popular product and a lucrative brand, is quite secondary. For me, the connection and total surety are supreme.