10:17 AM 1/11/2010 (date written)
Karl’s page (a feature page on my work at Karl’s web site)
Karl’s web site
Two forces are operating in my painting at this time. Both connect to my interest to establish a reductive process in my work; move away from my long history of AE structures, mostly with gesture intensive painting. So I keep on painting, these days, using structures that feel comfortable at the time of their use. Work executed in the past two years, for the most part, does incorporate reductive reasoning. If I take this reductive thinking too far toward its extreme end, my work tends to get lost. If it gets lost for me, then it has to get lost for anybody trying to connect with it. When I feel lost, I add back some modulations -gesture or color field, and I seem to get back on track. I dance around minimalism but never quite join it.
I have gone through two digital cameras since 2000. On my second camera the odometer just rollover over to its 2nd 10,000 images. As a photographer I view the world as a painter. My photographs are composed with a painter’s eye. I am also an impulsive photographer. If something out there interests me the moment I see it, I take a picture of it. This isn’t film! The only restrictions for me with regard to digital photography is the size of the hard drive. When it fills up, I get another one and keep shooting!
Four computer manipulated digital images are included in this set of images. For some reason I can’t leave an off camera image alone. I have to tinker with it. In some pieces I intentionally flattening the picture to relate more closely to the picture plane and picture edges. Some pictures require more computer manipulations than others to accomplish this task. Other images require little computer manipulation and I keep the structure close to what happened off camera. There are manipulations that are composites of several separate photographs. There are re-imaged composites that have been abstracted heavily but still retain some of the original digital image’s form. I manipulate these images in the same way I paint. Whatever the image requires of me I do the task.
I don’t evaluate any of my work according to any acceptable criteria; how it fits or doesn’t fit to arguments for or against modernism and postmodernism. I evaluate it to whether I like it or don’t like it. It = a specific work. I have no other way to look at the world. After all, it is my brain that interprets the world I live in. My art is created through this filter.
I wrote this statement before I selected the images. Eh? What I said above illustrates that painters should paint and not talk (or write)! And what I write also points up facts to how illusive a topic an artist’s statement really is. For me, I change my mind every minute of the day. And love every minute of it. And…. tomorrow I select different images to show and think of other things to say about it. How schizophrenic!
Ain’t life grand?
Here are 8 paintings and 4 fotos. Enjoy!
Also please visit Karl Maenz’s web site. He is a fine painter and photographer, and to say the least a fine friend.
