Painting at The Edge - Painting [in] The Noise Field

Assuming there is an avant-garde in painting, I predict that there would always be an avant-avant-garde, a "garde" before the avant-garde. It is from this position, hypothetical at heart, that I begin painting.

I want my paintings to stand out in the history of art, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. I attempt to do this by sticking as faithfully as possible to the traditions I was "thrown" into, to use a term borrowed from philosophy.

I choose never to diverge from tradition. It is my choice. It is also a first principle in my art. I have seen too many contemporary artists, painters, fall into a kind of Bureaucratic Painting, a vulgar Technocratic form of painting. All technique with no spirit, no soul.

If all the painters were currently wearing red squares on their vests, I would wear an orange triangle, just to stand out. I strive to imitate reality with such fidelity that when I'm finished, reality begins to look like my paintings.

Collectors of fine antiquities will be familiar with the term Patina. In essence, Patina is what happens to Bronze with time and exposure to the elements. With regard to antiques, Patina is similar. It's the character that the piece has. If it is a piece of antique furniture, a small knick in the finish might give it character, and would be part of its "patina", the character that it has from the passing of time and exposure to the elements, part of the life of the antique, its history, and so forth.

What I did as a painter over the course of several decades was observe patina everywhere I could. I observed objects when they broke, how they broke, what paint looked like when it dried and began to flake. I have "cured" boxes and boxes of paper, from newsprint to all sorts of pieces of paper, meaning that I kept them to see how they would "age" with time. I therefore studied the processes of yellowing of newsprint and so forth, over time.

Anything that could grow old or begin to decline or decay, I studied as carefully as I could. I spent countless hours staring at the walls, observing how my cigarette smoke caused them to yellow and to eventually turn brown. I studied tears in paper and cardboard, as well as fractures and cracks in other materials, all within the confines of my Atelier, or art studio.

It was a serious artistic practise of observation and contemplation, theorizing, and envisioning. That is the physical reality that I strove to imitate in my art, and I succeeded. Now whatever you look at will look like my paintings, for I have imitated reality as closely as I could. You can vandalize my paintings, throw them in the trash, and they will always be beautiful. They will stand out, even in the back of your closet, if you chose to store them there.

That is the secret sauce, however. I also had to make sure that my paintings would stand out, so I designed them with a secret twist, to make them contrast, so that they actually would be differentiable with regard to actual physical reality. The paintings would grow old, break, decline and decay, but they would do so more beautifully than Nature itself would. In that sense, the art I made was and is a statement: That beauty endures all things, that at the End of History, Beauty perseveres.

But I have moved onto other things. That was mainly The History-Project, begun in the Summer of 2001. Now, at the start of the year, 2014, I am moving into the Noise Field, with Noise Field Paintings. Stay tuned. It should be remarkable, if not outright spectacular.

[A.G. (c) 2014]


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