repeatability

D:\artstatements\repeatablility.txt

2:48 AM 12/31/2007

repeatability

Working the way I do, conceptual and technical structure derived from purist automatism (as an ideal), repeatability is relative to the moment. Over time some image structures show up again and again. I believe they derive from a central part of my nature; exist as finger prints exist. These image structures, once fleshed-out, become a signature.

My working (making) structure doesn’t allow a repeatable element to exist as a precondition for starting point. This would violate the integrity of the experiment as it exists at this time. If a repeatable element shows up during the making process as part of a first solution idea, then so be it. It then becomes part of a painting and is subject to removal if the next first solution idea so deems. Don’t ya love the process? You can never step into the same river twice. Love it????!!!!!

Over the years, if or when I was trying to find an image that connected to a commercial market -clients, galleries, museums, etc.- repeatability is what I thought was important. I needed to make a series of paintings that related in all ways to each other; not to make things that are resoundingly different from each other; images that are consistent, similar, understandable (somehow through repeatability). Consistently related images creates a strength (what, how???). When i tried to do this, the images would get progressively mannered as time did its deed on the image and my interest in continuing the image. So far the Voyage series of 18 paintings done in the late 1960’s was the only set of consistently related paintings I ever produced that were exciting to make over the 1-2 years they were made.

In the end, even if a painting of a certain type of image was selling well, I had to give it up because eventually I simply got sick of making them. The abstract seascape paintings made from 1981-1987 was a project that ran overtime for me. In the end I made these damn things because they were selling. Eventually i had to end it and move on. In 1987 I returned to abstract painting and automatism.

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