Painting
Snow Weather
I thought these pictures were painted as a love-note to nature—to weather and light and the crazy variety of natural forms. But really what they are is a tiny homage to the act of painting.
They are the product of a hopeless admiration for the paint-flinging Abstract Expressionists, and above all to that historically proven painter's painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder.
Another recluse, and, as it happens, another Albert—in this case, York—inspires me by creating small-scale paintings that sit in tense perfection between the human and natural worlds.
That phrasing is flawed, as humans are of course part of the natural world. I'm interested in painting as a learned language that sometimes seeks to translate the act of seeing into this weird but somehow sensible language of painting.
In the New Yorker several years ago, Calvin Tompkins asked Albert York, "Why do you paint?" He answered, "I think we live in a paradise. This is the Garden of Eden, really it is. It might be the only paradise we ever know, and it's just so beautiful, with the trees and everything here, and you feel you want to paint it. Put it into a design. That's all I can say."
Thanks to William Corbett, for his beautiful essay on Albert York, where I first heard of Calvin Tompkins's New Yorker interview with the artist.
