New Paintings 2008
25 new paintings were completed this summer. They vary greatly in scale (from 8 inches to slightly more than six feet across), and fall under one of two quite different spheres of modernist influence -- but all expand, I think, on the theme I was exploring in last year's images: namely, the collision and mutual absorption of modern formalist principles and pre-modern plastic aesthetics. This year more than earlier I am aware -- and am pursuing the implications -- of a kind of formalist-modernist contingency theory wherein a sort of imaginary history of Western European modernist painting ca. 1913 - 1960 can have evolved organically, peacefully out of its nineteenth-century roots (rather than through its violent rejection, as was by and large the case). This is the beginning of an art that never was; that might have become; that isn't? (Please click on the links marked "New Paintings 2008" above.)