I'm Not Here to Explain the Painting

There's a question every working artist learns to dread, and it usually comes from someone who genuinely cares about the work. It goes like this: "What does it mean?"

The honest answer, most of the time, is something like: I don't know. I mixed some colors, dragged a brush across linen, stepped back, looked at it for a while, and then made my lunch.

That's not humility and it's not a dodge. It's just the truth about how a painting gets made.

I got serious about oil painting because I couldn't stop looking at light. Specifically, the kind of light you get on the California coast in the late afternoon, when the sun is low enough that the surface of a wet rock looks like it's lit from inside. That's not a concept. It's a physical phenomenon that lasts about 20 minutes before it changes into something else entirely. You either catch it or you don't.

This is Rocky Beach, a panel I painted at a cove in Laguna. After I posted a progress shot, someone asked me: "What were you trying to say about the ocean?"

I was trying to say the foam was a slightly warmer gray than I expected. That was pretty much it.

Here's what I've figured out about making paintings: the ones that end up meaning something didn't usually start out trying to mean something. They started out trying to be accurate. True to the color, the shape, the specific quality of light on a specific surface at a specific time. And then something in that accuracy becomes resonant, and people see things in it, and they tell me what it means to them. Which is often something I never thought about.

That seems like the right order of operations to me. The viewer completes the painting. I just get it to the point where it's worth completing.

The art world runs on a different model. The press release comes before the show. The artist statement explains what the artist is "exploring" and what the work is "in conversation with" and what "question it asks." And I understand why that machinery exists. But I think it often works backwards. You end up writing the statement first, then making work that fits it, and somewhere in that process you lose the thing that made you want to paint in the first place.

What made me want to paint was specific. A particular ranch in the California hills where the grass goes gold in August. The face of a woman in a hat with light falling across it at exactly the wrong angle, which turns out to be the right angle for oil paint. A still life of citrus that started as a warmup and ended up being one of the best things I've made. None of those started with a statement. They started with looking.

I can tell you what those paintings looked like to make. I can talk about the palette, the ground, the number of sessions. I can show you the reference photo I started from and the exact point where I stopped following it. What I can't do is tell you what they mean in a way that improves on just looking at them.

So I've mostly stopped trying to explain.

What I've done instead is make more paintings. Around 80 in the last two years, give or take. Some are in homes across California, Texas, and a few places I didn't expect. A handful were licensed to a distributor for reproduction. A few ended up on tees that people wear to flea markets and ranches and Venice on a Sunday morning. The work is out there doing whatever it does, and I'm in the studio working on the next one.

The feedback I get most often isn't about meaning at all. It's about light. People say a painting looks like the place they grew up, or like a particular afternoon they remember, or like somewhere they've never been but want to go. I didn't plan for any of that. It just happens when the painting is accurate enough.

That's the only explanation I can offer: accuracy. When the color is right, the painting doesn't need a caption. When it isn't, no caption helps.

If Rocky Beach looks like somewhere you know, reproductions start at $25. The framed versions are also on the site. Either way, looking is free.