Faculty Spotlight: Joseph Lawton, David Storey, Mark Street
I have been making paintings centered on the fluidly permeable boundaries of image and abstraction since moving to New York from California thirty years ago. I brought along a love of picture making, anecdote and color that were key elements of a Bay Area regionalism that shaped my work as a young painter. Over the subsequent years there has been a gradual movement towards a transcendent clarity of the incidental over the anecdotal in both image and in the paint itself. I still make abstract ensembles that function as figurative events and simultaneously occupy an equally non-literal yet compelling spatial and chromatic arena.
Painting is the proper forum for the description of an entire world. It can be the endless, timeless vista seeming to have boundaries but presenting none. Once the contract of immersion is agreed, all separations dissolve, the physical laws of here and now are void and (as opposites merge) we arrive at a state of transrational, pan-sensory harmonious otherness.