I was always an abstract painter. I preferred the type of compositions called "non-objective". The painters from the '50s often claimed that all painting was abstract. I know what they mean. To the painter, a good painting is all color, texture, pattern and underlying structure. It was those New York guys from the 1945 - 1955 period: Pollack, Rothko DeKooning, Kline, (zip guy) and others who made paintings which required a re-definition for paintings. It was Greenberg and Motherwell who wrote the abstract-expressionist manifestos, gave the world the New York School's way to consider painting. It was the New York painters I saw first, in Life magazine, then in the L.A. County Museum of Art. Though I was 11 years old, I was right there with that way of painting, my art impulses were in line with abstract, with gesture, with pattern. My earliest fascination with the visual were more related to object-field dynamics than figure. Then, I saw the three San Francisco painters, Bischoff, Diebenkorn and, especially, Park, who defined The Bay Area Figurative School. These painters had suffered Still and Rothko preaching the spiritual heroics of abstract painting until they rebelled against the dogma. They painted the urgent gestures, they painted large, with big brushes and strong colors, but they painted figures. Figures in environments. Their paintings were unashamedly pictures. When in abstract-expressionist mode, I made flat, patterned, gestural paintings attempting to kill any possible object, to make paintings which were all field. But, even then, there was always some kind of imagery, some figure, some kind of atmosphere which suggested a particular subject. It seems to me, all painting could just as easily be called figurative. Paintings always depict something, even when they seems only pattern, or texture, it can be always seen a depiction of some object. What causes a viewer's delight in a painting, is when they see or feel something in it, a subject, some content, whether the painter plans for them to or not. For my own clarity, I focused on an understanding of painting as communicating subject and content. Subject is the what is depicted and content is how it is depicted. Subject is straight forward, if you see a tree in a painting, that's the subject. If you see pattern, texture, colors or a field of mono color, what you see is the subject. Content is a different matter. The content of a painting is what you feel as you take in a painting. To a large extent, the communicated content is derived from the experience the painter had while painting. The painting is a collection of all the decisions the painter made, the paint texture, the brush strokes, the color choices. Each brush stroke has an intent, the act of each stroke is a gesture. The painting collects all these intents and gestures, all the instances of mental activity transformed into touches of paint on its surface. The painting accumulates a memory of the thought which went into it. This memory is read by the viewer. Whether in a glance or over years of seeing the painting, the viewer receives the painting's memory, this communication, I understand as the painting's content.
As to the subject, when I looked at David Park's great paintings and some of Bishoff's best figurative work, I saw how, the subject was very much like a photograph, a casual one, a snapshot. The painters often seemed to be saying the choice of subject is not important, its how it's painted that counts, the act of painting, the gestures, most importantly, that it have a look both passionate and easy. For me representational drawing was a pain. I enjoyed drawing too much to be tied to the contors of some object in life or in my imagination. I liked the flow of line and making abritary gradiations of shading. The act of drawing, not the forming shapes which pulled triggers of representation in the viewer's mind. And yet, I liked the Bay Area Painters because their work had representational subject as a basis for their otherwise free and easy brushwork. To me their work looked like it could be based on photographs, my Dad was a photographer, I didn't like bothering with drawing "scenes", so I began experiments with useing photographs as the basis of painting. Little did I know then that there was a long history in painters using photo images instead of drawing to begin paintings.
