In a forest, the ground floor is called the “understory.” It’s a lovely, metaphoric
word that calls up an image of the woods as a kind of giant structure, with busy
levels like a parking garage or an apartment building. It also makes me think
about the layers in paintings; developing from a blank surface also called the
“ground”, and gradually growing rich and tangled, with ideas and associations,
choices revised or left in place, stories tacit or implicit. In my work, the finished
surface always hints at those deeper layers; they exist as the literal and
figurative understory.
Formally, the pieces in this show play with fictions, as time gets bent and
shuffled, layers interlock and obscure each other, and edges become
inconclusive. Depth emerges out of a flat surface; colors are altered by colors
over and around them; buried shapes and ideas refuse to vanish entirely. There
are bold façades that make a pitch for attention, and then there’s all this
shadowy “other stuff” that supports or hides behind them. So which layer tells
the real story? Or is this less of a story, and more of a situation to stumble into?
We (painter and viewer) continue the telling of a painting by taking the eye on a
journey, back and forth, around and through, using whatever understandings
and tools we have with us to make our paths.
As I’ve worked on this group of paintings, I’ve thought a lot about the stories we
tell ourselves and each other. (For better and worse, it’s where lots of our
pathmaking tools come from.) This body of work eventually absorbed under-
stories of various kinds: wisdom and legend, personal experience, dogma and
propaganda, tall tale and sales pitch. In the process, the paintings gradually
became like short stories of their own, separate but linked; like trails in the
woods maybe, or chapters in a book.
