January 10 - February 13, 1998
Reception Saturday, January 10, 6-8 PM

The work in this exhibit is a result of a process that begins to answer the question of not what to paint but how. The process, or system, stems from the attempt to establish a definition of how a painting is made, and the work in the show is a physical example of what I have discovered. The departure point is the historical narrative represented by the rectilinear support. However, the crucial difference presented here is the acknowledgement of the stretcher as the informer of not only the shape of the painting but also its imagery. The stretcher's active role allows it to participate as a visible component of the painting. I have attempted to establish the painting as a complete entity that uses, as a starting point, the reality of what it is and how it is constructed as a tool of communication.

There are two variations of an activated stretcher represented in the exhibit. One deals with the conventional support that has been designed in anticipation of the affect it will cause when paint is applied to the canvas. The other utilizes a found object, a wooden pallet, also chosen for its anticipated results. The stretcher pre-empts the traditional role of the atrist's hand as the generator of mark-making and transfers that function to the artist's ability to choose the marks, or anticipated marks, before the painting is established. The delay caused by this action is evident within the work even though the stretcher is hidden.

The paint reveals the information contained by the stretcher and records it on the intermediary canvas. Due to the pliancy of the canvas, the pressure of the artist's hand leaves traces in the paint of the stretcher's design and other information about color, sheen, paint coverage and thickness, as well as the movement of the artist's body outside the painting. A tension is created between what is behind the canvas and how that information is revealed that parallels the tension between the conceptual and intuitive aspects of the work. One aspect is precise and predeterminied while the other is inexact and open to chance and risk.

The title Flesh and Bone is a metaphor for the anatomy of the paintings; however, the context in which this work operates is more than self-referential. The work has a relationship to stretched objects found in the built environment, such as curtain walls on buildings, thin metal sheets on airplanes, and packaging of consumer products. But the relationship to the human/animal body, established by the skin-like quality of the canvas and paint and the skeletal-like quality of the stretcher, is strongest. Within this relationship, the abstract and self-referential nature of the work is grounded, just as the production concepts are, allowing the work to transcend pure decoration without detracting from it's ability to stand on it's own.