I have just always felt that abstract painting,
if one chooses to look at paintings as vehicles
to take you to some other place,
that the abstract painting was much more open
and therefore it could take you to more complicated
places
Abstract painting may have a lot of references
to the real world
but they’re not specific and they’re not involved with
a narrative;
they’re not telling you so much what to do
I find it very interesting in that I keep thinking
about it all the time,
keep thinking about how to look at paintings,
what’s going on in the painting
That’s why I’ve always really believed in the strength
of abstract painting
I’ve been working in this studio for about 10 years
There’s a very beautiful light up here coming off
the river
I mean, sometimes the light is just like,
you get this late afternoon light
which is just like thrillingly special
So much of painting is just about light
The pigment is just some sort of substance which reacts
to light
So you become more and more…you’re aware of the light
you’re in
and I don’t try to self-consciously replicate it
I spend a lot of time just wandering around the garden
I garden by attrition
That’s my hobby, is basically weeding the moss
I’m trying to make these large patches of moss
and I like sort of large monochromatic areas
So I get this myrtle which seems to be growing all out
in the woods
so it’s easy to just say, get me a lot of myrtle
and we’ll put it here
There’s myrtle, juniper and bamboo and moss
While the problems in my work
seem very formal, like, say,
a very specific formal color situation,
it’s being much more influenced by naturalistic color
that’s around
This painting is just layers of…layers of terra vert,
you know, green earth paint
And it started out with…there were colors underneath
so that’s how you get the variation in the values
but I’m just layering it, you know, with terra vert
I was in here the other day and I was just
looking at the painting and thinking,
I want this painting to be able to take me to something
like paradise
and it can just be like instantaneous;
it can just be like…like, it’s like this tiny little
moment
but there is this moment of transferal
And, you know, that’s what the arts do
You can refer to it as paradise, you know, call
it whatever you want
I like the idea of paradise