Untitled #41 Painting

For several years now I've been interested in the labor of painting, free from any narrative or didactic intent. What is the content of painting when the subject is essentially empty of meaning, and is it possible for that work to avoid the mere negation of meaning, but to instead become an affirmation of the value of the labor of painting? So these are some of the paintings I've made. They begin as automatic drawings done during meetings, like the doodles one used to do while talking on the phone, before you could use the phone while buying groceries. I remember as a boy finding small drawings next to the phone at my grandparents’ home, which I now recognize as my earliest exposure to abstraction. My attempts to recreate them always failed, even though they seemed so simple. The best doodles, it turns out, require distraction. Only a mild disinterest, a divided mind, can doodle well. So now I begin paintings when I should be doing something else. They start as inconsequential marks free from the weight of meaning, which are then treated as formal studies. Thus they are transferred faithfully to painting surfaces, creating frameworks for the construction of paintings that are rooted not in a desire to convey a narrative content, but as positive experiments into the labor of painting.