I see painting, first and foremost, as a phenomenological study of visual perception. We all believe without question that we know what a landscape looks like — it’s not until we’re tasked with committing one to canvas that we can appreciate how little we actually process in the course of everyday seeing. If in our day to day lives we concern ourselves mostly with the simple recognition of objects, painting means attending to — and elucidating — the perceptual phenomena responsible for bringing these objects to visual presence. Light, shadow, perspective, color — the nuance of nearly everything that belongs purely to vision remains unnoticed because in the practical business of getting around we see through them. The task of painting is to bring these quasi-invisible phenomena to explicitly visibility so they can be recognized and known.
Whatever else a painting can do — express a mood, convey a thought, ask a question, tell a story — it depends upon the artists ability to authentically render and effectively use this host of elusive phenomena that dwell only at the threshold of vision. When this basic phenomenological work is done well, the rest will follow almost as if by magic — this stuff of pure vision pulls along with it an entire metaphysics and the painting begins to speak to us of things that transcend the physical mechanics of sight. There is a way of knowing the world — an radically visual knowledge — that can only be grasped through the relationship that the practice of painting establishes between the seer and the seen. The Russian priest and polymath Pavel Florensky called painting “philosophy in color” — it’s a phrase that’s really stuck with me.
In his work Truth and Method the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that a painting is not merely a visual copy of what it depicts but is better understood as a real manifestation or “emanation” of its subject matter. This deep ontological connection between the work of art and the world suggests that that in and through the act of painting something you are actually increasing its being, making it exist in a manner it would not have existed otherwise. For me, painting does not mean merely making a record of what something looked like on a particular day, nor does it mean simply expressing my feelings about landscape. Painting is my attempt to participate directly in the ongoing drama of the visible. I feel a great deal of responsibility as a painter: the aim is not just to make pictures, but to help things exist more fully.
