(Click on any image to enlarge.)
The principle of what later came to be called "significant form," which lies behind Cézanne's still life subjects -- a few apples on a tabletop arranged to serve as the framework for a two-dimensional language of color, line and value -- became my avenue into non-objective painting. Cézanne's deliberate choice of subjects of no particular interest, and (pace Meyer Shapiro) without narrative or thematic connotations, was a major step toward formalist modernism's insistence that form itself was the true subject, and would provide the real drama, of a painting. My still life paintings are, at best, unpretentious efforts to apprehend three-dimensional form in a two-dimensional medium. The process of painting them, however, has shown me many possible paths outside the borders of representation. (It's with the same principles in mind, by the way, that I typically select landscape subjects that are almost aggressively without topical or picturesque incident.)
