Statement

Painting Words:

Since becoming established as material for art, language has figured prominently in contemporary painting. The trouble is to understand how it works. What is at stake is finding a way to reconcile the equal investment of paint and text in the same surface.¹ In painting text operates like the paint itself, as a metaphor summoning other, non-literal meanings. Consequently, text in painting is profuse because it works both materially and linguistically.

I want to understand how the meanings of words shift when they are also painted. For me a fruitful place to begin is to paint words that already embody shifting, notably anagrams. To begin an anagram painting I choose a word, for example “metaphysical,” and make an anagram from it. I then expand on the anagrammatic function by writing a text composed using only the letters of the chosen word. The expansiveness of language is implicit in the writing that emerges, despite the constraint of using only a few letters.

In my most recent work I am painting two-word poems, particularly the words “Fang Song.” Fang Song is a font (though not the one used in the paintings), and I love it for the way it sounds and how it gives me a sharp sensation behind my upper lip.

February 27, 2011

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¹ Charles Harrison, “The Trouble with Writing,” in Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language, (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001), 34.