The world is saturated with color, cacophonous and harmonious, always clamouring in the eye.
First trained as a poet, I loved the vivid synaesthesia of language, the way green stains the mind--mint, apple, grass, goose turds. When young, having almost died, I dreamt of painting and so picked up a brush and began to struggle with a medium without words.
I don’t believe the maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words. As Marshall McCluan said, the medium is the message. So painting is a kinesthetic reaction to a momentary impulse, the deliberative process of attending to the process of applying color which is an inherently inchoate pursuit.
The delight in painting for me is that the only words that apply to a painting are simple--line, mass, saturation, stain, glaze, blue. These words hold meaning for painters much as chords do for musicians. They mean only what they mean as one attends to the medium.
We live in a time when all around us is changing dramatically. In a hundred years who will still know corn crib, or hay bale, or tine. Painting in northern Michigan is for many of us an act of reverence, of remembrance, of appreciation. The act of painting is ephemeral...here and gone. But a painting, like a memory, may remain, may remind us to look closely at the world that flashes momentarily in front of us.
