The Paris Review - Fall 2016

are very oblique. There’s a wooziness, a kind of disorientation, inherent in
the oblique that we never quite get with the planar. In other words, you
could organize a battle scene where people are slaughtering each other, and
if it’s planar you won’t quite share the chaos of being there. You will have
stepped back. You’ll have organized pictorially in a way that can’t help but
be metaphoric. In this sequence of four paintings, the process of disorientation
is gradual. By the time you get to that last panel, where nothing is
parallel to the picture plane, you’re meant to be a little seasick. You feel like
you’re falling off both sides of the painting, as if there’s a fictional spatial
mound in the middle that is leaking down its sides, and her left leg, her left
arm, the stairs, and the roofline are all kind of dripping off this imagined
spatial hump.
In the upper right, where the boyfriend is going down the stairs, one has
entered a game of Chutes and Ladders bisected by an unyielding white vertical.
We’re meant to feel the division between them—that they’re separated
irreconcilably. Their two worlds are difficult to bridge pictorially. And then
the lower left-hand one—that’s a Hopper-esque summary of how desolate
their relationship is. And the upper left one is supposed to be a kind of seductive
introduction—this might be a beautiful place, there might be beautiful
light, but there’s something a little creepy about how relentlessly vertical and
repetitive those banisters are. We can’t help but subliminally feel all those
stripes and bars as somehow imprisoning.
I remember a million years ago I was at the Vatican Museums, and they
had a tiny, cruddy relief sculpture of two figures, and it wasn’t anything beautiful
at all, but I thought, Why am I so drawn to this? And I realized it was
because they are lovers. If there’s a general overriding interest in my work, it
has to do with how things come together and try to cohere. I don’t want this
coming together to seem easy or automatic or pretty or sentimental, I want
there to be a kind of agon. I want to see things brought together through difficulty.
So whether it’s a man or a woman or whether it’s a person in a place,
I’m always aware of the downside. We live in a pretty horrible world, and
when you do find a beautiful place to paint, it seems to me slightly strange not
to have that sense of conflict included or implied. If you just paint the beautiful
spots, it’s a dream world, and neither Ann nor I live in a dream world.
Following spread : Forum East; Overcast, 2000, oil on Masonite, 12" x 16".
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