The White Paintings

As the recession wore on, a whiteness descended, pure exhaustion, and I realized that forgetting, almost more than remembering, is how we create meaning, narrative, and myth from the basic metaphysical properties of yes and no. I went through a "white" period, making hybrid drawing-paintings, to understand the guts of an image, the way you can feel a shape through your eyes, a story through a shape. By limiting color, representational images were drained of specificity, fossilized, mythologized. The process keeps leading back to myths...back to love and sex and death..., desire, power, need, life. My life. Art: the eternal stall tactic. I thought I would brand my paintings. They ended up branding me...