Why limit yourself? Other people LOVE doing it for you.

-----

Abstract art can offer an escape from the descriptive barrage of verbiage that pervades and occupies our consciousness. It provides a door to the sub-conscious. Not everyone will open that door, much less go through it, but it is behind that door that I work on my abstract paintings. The original inspiration could be a color, or a shape, that I want to explore – but by the time the painting is finished, it may have vanished completely, after inspiring another mark, another color. This happens on a non-verbal (which means subconscious to me) level. The process feels liberating, when it works. It feels therapeutic to me. Sometimes verbal ideas bubble to the surface, when I sometimes incorporate them into the non-specific abstraction. Verbal associations, interpretations, and titles come later, back on the other side of the door: things like, “Oh my God, it looks just like Elizabeth!”

-----

I paint partly for therapeutic reasons. Therapy is usually expensive, and I’ve often had to take other work to pay for it.

-----

There are things that cannot be expressed satisfactorily in words – things hidden deep in the womb of the psyche, which can surface in no other way, at least in my case.

-----

With the world in the state it’s in, “art” may seem a frivolous occupation at best. It may be ecologically irresponsible, ideologically irrelevant, or bankrupt. The very word “art” is pretentious. And yet, what else can reconcile the disparate elements of the human psyche like “art”?

-----

When I paint in acrylic, it’s because it dries quickly, and the brushes are easy to clean. When I paint in oil, it’s because it dries slowly, and because the colors seem more luminescent.

-----

Until middle-age, my dabblings in art had been insignificant, sufficing merely to supply me with the bare necessities.

-----

There’s “unmanifest” magic in every shape, every visible conglomeration of atoms – but where EXACTLY is it? In the curve? In the straight lines? In the dots? In the relationship between them? Should one elaborate, or reduce it (if one thinks one’s located “it”)?

-----

Everything that isn’t figurative, but more than just “squares,” is hard to make (usually), demanding as it does the most “pure” aesthetic concentration the artist possesses; interminable and profound abstract deliberation is required before making the most “insignificant” mark (insignificant when viewed (or unnoticed) as a part of the finished whole).

-----

One often has trouble knowing when to declare a work “finished,” since a canvas (for example) has ages, or stages of development, as a person has. A newborn work of art can be beautiful, but, like a baby, its beauty lies mostly in its potential. Nurtured by its “mother,” it progresses to “maturity,” which is, presumably, the “age” at which one should stop working on it, if it’s a painting. But like so many people, it may well have been cuter as a baby. And one should not ignore the presence, among collectors, of the artistic equivalent of the “chicken hawk,” who is looking precisely for “newborn” works. Perhaps Jackson Pollock’s work attracts this kind of collector, as does, perhaps, the “spontaneous painting gesture” in general. Mothers who won’t let their children “grow up”?

-----

To strive to visualize, let alone communicate, a “distillation,” an “essence” of something, of anything, in a limited, rectangular shape, or any other, ain’t easy. For my first half century, roughly, I’d experienced my artistic “growth” as a process of distillation, elimination of the non-essential. Hearing someone describe a work as “barren,” at a certain point, it occurred to me that elaboration also has its charm. The more things you put into something, the more there will be to find in it. This seeming need to complicate things is also apparent in language. Our love of acronyms, for instance, and the prevalence of gobbledygook. Historically, we witness the mass importation of foreign words in English, such as giving animals French names when eating them. Surely papers have been written about it, and their authors have disagreed, complicating matters even further.

-----

To strive for ethnic purity in art is to go backwards. Which is fine with me. Going backwards in somebody else’s culture is to go forward in your own.

-----

There’s this big amorphous blob in my head, largely composed of “unprocessed” material. It looks unapproachable, yet is a source for my painting, for everything. The preoccupations are there too, the inescapable, inevitable future horror.

-----

Coincidence plays a major role in my work, as in my life in general. Nevertheless, I am guided by a lot of aesthetic stimuli. After all, everything has an aesthetic value, and sometimes it is the artist's job to convey this to others, as Warhol did with his soup cans, and his successor, Koons, with his pornographic images. Personally, I just want to put it down or display it, without knowing exactly why. If I knew that, I wouldn't have to paint it. Then it would have become a verbal issue. (I'm not talking about my illustrative works now, but about “abstractions.”)

-----

You don't have to look far for inspiration. However, choosing between the endless possibilities is much more difficult, both thematically and materialistically. It is not that I "take" elements from all those different sources of inspiration, but that I recognize my own elements overall.

-----

I often feel I have as little control over the development of my creations as a mother has over her child’s. Some are obedient, passively responding to my directions, and finished in no time. Others take a direction of their own, and carry me along. Still others, given more than their share of love and inspiration, never respond. Years later they emerge suddenly from storage, like 17-year locusts, and with a few simple brush-strokes their metamorphosis to masterpiece is complete.

-----

I use titles as handles, to remember what’s what on lists. My titles must relate to the work in a way that’s immediately recognizable to me, if no one else. They are not an integral part of the work, rather a free-associated after-thought. They can change. [There are, of course, exceptions].

-----

Although the occasional work is thematically determined, or predetermined, even owing its very existence to its title, most titles are arrived at by random association, during or after completing the work, and are subject to arbitrary changes.

-----

Music and painting are, of course, very different things, especially in the speculative, manipulative and often hypocritical world of "modern art," where being "in" is very important, and fortunes are made on castles in the air.

-----
Usually, titles come and go rather whimsically, and a “working title” is rarely a final title. But on some paintings, like “Cihuacoatl” (an Aztec goddess), the name runs away with the painting. I painted over Cihuacoatl several times, but the material itself seemed to have bonded, somehow, with its title, and wouldn’t part with its Aztec look – serpentine and (although a small work) monolithic. It evolved slowly, with small but unrelenting alterations, year after year, and even as I write, in April ’95, it is not completely “resolved.”
Almost.
As soon as Cihuacoatl got a name, she rode it.