Throughout my career as an artist, because of an exaggerated knack for self-delusion, I have remained convinced painting pictures is a worthwhile endeavor, even (or especially) in this era of our mad hyper-world.
This belief has been important to me. While I adamantly insist my work remain connected to its historical antecedents, to suffer the deprivations of the struggling artist has always seemed to me unnecessary romanticism. For an artist, the hardest thing to do is to keep out-of-step.
Most of the time, when struggling to explain what my work means, I lapse into opaque sociological explanations about how the development of photography has forced painters to turn inward, toward the human psyche to find the fecund field of painting’s unique expression. The clash of the overwhelmed modern psyche and the innate insanity of the hyper-world, with its inexorable rush into a technological abyss is the critical motif underlying much of my work. As a young man, I struggled under the perfidious theoretical influence of the Frankfurt School and especially of those two long-deceased Teutonic crackpots Wally and Teddy. That influence has led me to see the act of painting, and the struggle to extend its relevance as a metaphor for hope in the human soul. We no longer control our technology, which has become an unstoppable force, has replaced God as our object of worship and faith and has essentially eliminated even our belief in art. Unfortunately, being a painter in the modern world is often a lonely business.
While I have never considered myself a surrealist, I know that the marvelous energies of the dream and spontaneous creation are the cornerstones of my work. I have for many years believed that those exquisite energies are most sublimely embodied in Jazz, which has been, and continues to be my most important inspiration.