30” x 26”, oil on canvas

Perhaps the centuries part

And feelings are transmitted.

When I began making these paintings, I liked long complicated texts that took much more effort to read than it did to simply look at the painting. I wanted reading and looking to be incommensurate. Over time, I began to see that I could make a different kind of object, one where you could read the text almost at a glance. The experience would be very different.

It’s a common experience to be moved by something, an artwork, a line of poetry perhaps that was made centuries ago. The past opens up and something is transmitted to us, from someone long dead, or long long long dead. This is almost miraculous, that the dead speak to us. All culture is collaboration with the dead.

 “I do not invent, I only transmit,” said Confucius, about 2500 years ago.