I wrote this short essay for the Beverley Street Studio School‘s 30×30 fundraiser in January 2022. This is the first time I’ve written anything about the influence Pousette-Dart has had on my work, I hope it helps you understand a little bit more of what I’m up to in my own work, and to seek out a Pousette-Dart painting to take a look at in person.
Somehow on a high school field trip in the late ‘80s, I ended up in the Hirshhorn Museum. It might have been peer pressure — until then, my favorite stop in DC had been the Air and Space Museum. I knew art was important to me, but I had more experience painting houses with my father than I did painting canvases. I knew little about contemporary art. But seeing one painting that day cut through all my expectations about what I would find in an art museum.
In front of me was a painting that looked like the surface of the moon. It was huge! Its texture was doing things I didn’t think you were allowed to do with paint. The thick mounds of colorful brushstrokes were like a 3D map. It was chaotic for a map, but there was order present as well — a containing, resonant hum. Both the chaos and the hum were familiar states of mind to this younger version of myself. Whichever state was winning that particular day, my teenage brain didn’t even think to look at the label and learn the artist’s name.
I was working in my studio in Brooklyn by the time I looped back and identified the painting I had seen that day — Cavernous Earth with 27 Folds of Opaqueness by Richard Pousette-Dart. That first encounter with 27 Folds gave me a sense of possibility that I carried with me as I found my own voice as a painter. The spark of that experience led me to question the teachers who taught me that texture is a minor element of painting. Instead, I recognized that a present, pronounced texture was one of the available ways to generate light from a canvas, and that, for me, this light was primary. By then, the richly organic style of abstraction and optical flicker in Pousette-Dart’s art were strong influences in my own work. I had embraced the love of experimentation that I saw everywhere as he pushed at the edges of what paint could do.
Most of all, I found a thesis for myself in something Pousette-Dart seemed to know — that the edges of the canvas are the shape within which all successive shapes resonate. This was essential to what I wanted my work to say — that we all contribute to something bigger than ourselves within this finite space we share. Whether we cooperate or not, we are still participating. We are either adding to the collective hum, or to the chaos.
So why not resonate — and generate some light — while we can?
