The current paintings are research notes about the impoverishments of power struggles, social anxiety, and communication in society and culture. I prefer to study the reasoning behind all dance, miscommunications, and battles that happen between my work and I, rather than make paintings about my feelings on the subject. The paintings represent the mannerisms of each day's events, facts learned, artwork (or ideas) that caught me, sounds I heard, foods I ate, colors I saw. They aim at describing moments that I do not fully understand or yet know how to describe. My interest in painting lies in that attempt. In that space, I can employ painting language as ideogram and diagram to learn from poverty.

How to start a language

Language are letters and paint. Language is the tool used to communicate; it is the manner in which we speak. Language can define words. Language has a speaker. Language is to have a tongue in one's head. It is a philosophy of decisions that keep in mind what one has already learned. To speak is to break silence, to rant, recite, lecture, preach, it is to be eloquent in discourse. And therefore a commingled language best describes what I cannot explain with writing or speech. To depict this process, it is important for me to make my “painting notations” in a system of various languages which will stage one unified language as research.

I think of the process systems or languages of cooking, music, teaching, movies and Jeet Kune Do - to name a few – as ways to juxtapose formal painting elements that react to the affects, colors and events of poverty. Weakness in communication, finance, imagination, education, an abundance of complex anxieties – which we all possess – are analogous to formal lessons in painting. I am curious how the forms can organize pictorial space in the final image by considering American's and Nicaraguan's ideas of surviving poverty. I establish limits for myself when painting - for the function of line, color, scale, and painting medium - by using a kind of poetic economy of communication. For example, my perception of the people's pride in the welfare system (from both countries) is described with color in Always-on Rain Hat. The viewer might dwell on the image of rain and the platform/hat, but there is more reward in seeing anxiety in the iridescent violet of the atmosphere, the brassness of the hat, and the cautiousness of the line. Regardless if the scene represents a perpetual rain hat, the iridescent green color of the rain in difference to the color of other forms, results in an obtrusive and prideful personality trait. In this painting, pride, is the only personality trait explained by color where the recognizable forms are not so black-and-white in content but brass in movement, so they may articulate the metaphorical function of the always-on rain hat. The heart of the work is the idiosyncratic dialogue of that study. What image remains on the painting is evidence that the work speaks in various tongues. I name the remainder which assembled the vocabulary of that study: Play.

Play “scientist”

I always wanted to be a scientist, which is why I relate painting to learning and organize it as an experiment. If I were a scientist, I would first establish a hypothesis. I would declare variables and limits, demonstrate inventions or field test the problem. I begin the experiment in these paintings by deciding on a “format stage” - a performance stage that delivers the act of the study – for communication. I've been told that my work seems coded. But my language is not coded intentionally to conceal information. It is coded because of the manner in which I read the information. I explain this manner as tone, but more specifically, it is the format stage of the painting. There are six current format stages which establish tone: abstract expressions, landscapes, diagrams, classifications, portraits and jokes. Each stage functions as primary evidence for how I approached the subject. This response to the problem is both the poetic and raw observation of the abstract situation. It is a play of constant compromise which will appear in the current experiment or artwork. This is evident in the work, for example: this week I read about a study that states that “the more you sit the shorter you live”. I analyzed the ingredients in Caldo Gallego, a Catalan soup. The chemical composition of smalt pigment became frightening. And, I admired the way a farmer composed his sentence when speaking about rutabagas. It seemed apt to make a landscape around the relationships between those experiences. In View of Nicaragua from Nicaragua these experiences are replaced by a stew of abstracted short blue character-forms gleaning root vegetables.

Language, human personality traits, and cognition mix in the paintings to explain each other – aligning the process of thinking with the purpose and act of painting. In learning about the welfare state and social impoverishment, I remember the anxieties of my own hopelessness. But the created language - for the purpose of the study – should come from the manifestations of the current format stage and not my biographical storytelling. I like to work among this play of memory, analytical problem-solving, and negative daydreaming.

Inventions to relieve poverty and generate it

At the start of this work, I wondered how I could place my painting language in a more recognizable world than before. How could I focus my vocabulary on the specifics of poverty? I responded to studies on poverty and to people's writings of their experiences in poverty by writing down inventions (and titles for paintings) that I imagine might both relieve and generate poverty. I felt that this was a naïve and quick reaction to my experience of poverty. My intuition was to build a system of making paintings that can use the invention as a representation for the weight impoverishment puts on communication. I am organizing these 47 impractical inventions with a less imaginary structure for painting – less than the intuitive first mark – to place my process of working in my perceptive “real” space. The invention is the stand-in for a process, it is a meme to analyze my classifications of content and form. The humor of the titles pushes my experiences with these impoverishments away from using only myself as example. I think of these inventions as fit for all. Some examples of these inventions are: Husband-Keeping Spray, Clean Trash Locator, All-Possessions Wood Converter, Never-Lie Wristband, Solar-Powered Ice Maker, The Family Repellent, Always-on Rain Hat, Humor-Resistant Vest.

Inspiration as Soul

The Surrealists related the unconscious mind to mark making in painting and gave reasoning behind their specific imagery and gesture. Their philosophy of automatism is not sufficient to explain my practice. Like the Futurists I propose, that one can master influences and redefine language and structure in each artwork. For me, the process of discovery while painting is more revealing of controlled intuition and thought than the satisfaction of representation or didacticism. I have more fun imagining the ending to a movie than what the ending of the movie usually is. I do not care if the viewer is interested in studying my artwork, or whether they can decipher my application of paint and follow my reasoning along the plane of the canvas or the space of the installations. I allow buffoonery to intervene and motivate the process of the paintings. For instance, this week, in the mornings before drawing, I read the NY Times, listened to Sonic Youth's Burning Spear, ate pancakes while watching an episode of the X-Files. I allowed these events to influence those drawings. Some paintings will focus on the framework of the documentation, but some will simply express the research of my morning. I think many activities, disciplines, jokes, subjects, facts, scientific laws, rules, social situations and other endless events are eerily related. In color and greed there can be frightening similarities. I've always felt greed from the orange dancers and bitterness from the ultramarine background in Matisse's The Dance. Matisse shows us this with his unorthodox use of color. I always replace his color and imagine how differently the forms' personality traits would change if they were a different color or without color. As I get older, I realize the fantasies and jokes I play in my head are examples of how I remember those eerily related events.

The act of painting became inspiring to me when I found out about Basquiat. I felt an intensity of information pass through me. I needed to do this to someone. It was similar when I saw what Gorky and Roberto Matta had done. Gorky's line represented a very human way of feeling – a keen awareness of time in one's own mind. Whereas, I feel that Matta was an architect of space disjunct, with such power that it physically displaced you. These two aspects of their work laid foundation for my necessity to act through painting. As I've found out about new artists, I've picked up on some of their sensitivities to better understand mine. Because of Guston's aggressive poetics of form, I was attracted to the space between representation and abstraction. I like the idea that I can grab language from the air above all painters. But to be aware of the influence is important to clarify my relationship between painting language and language systems. I am encouraged by the possibilities when I learn of Oyvind Fahlström's collaboration with language. Some of my lines are children of Agnes Martin's quiet self-reflecting drawing line and Van Gogh's stumbling paint lines. My work must continue to have a give and take with artist methods and habits. I imagine that I should not only learn from them but carry on their painting studies. I should not feel complacent in mere progress. I always learn more from failure.

Writing to learn: Drawing to learn

My failure to communicate clearly through writing or speech led me to abstract paintings. My greatest lesson at Bard has been drawing and writing to learn to be clear. At this point, drawing and writing have now the same fruit - writing has helped my drawing in depicting structure and my drawing writes to communicate. After reading William Zinsser's Writing to Learn it made sense that I was organizing my painting with the same expectations Zinsser believes writing will help to learn. I understand how ambiguous communication can fog my process to the viewer, but it has also been advantageous for some to look freely. As similar to the advantages clarity and simple structure have in writing - complex, foreign and ambiguous – conversations in painting best matches language with learning – overcoming disadvantages of written language. My expectation for a new language in painting is to move around those barriers.