Art has never been just a formal exercise. I started making art in the Abstract Expressionist era, but I was in Chicago rather than in New York. One of my teachers was Boris Margo, a Russian-born painter and printmaker. In my role as a professor, I teach courses in postmodernism as a critical theory, but I find it has limitations. But painting, for me, comes out of a physical, emotional and conceptual connection to the world.
Painting tries to connect with direct experience.
Of course, I can t grasp that experience, but I try. That trying is my art. I think it s a solid basis for my art. Claude Levi-Strauss talks about the connection we have with the world in an essay called I and Mind. We know things with our bodies and through our eyes, as well as through the culture we have learned.