Painted Way
The Painted Way series calls attention to the “drawings” and “paintings” that surround us in the urban built environment. For example, whereas bare winter tree branches sketch expressive nuanced linework against the moody, wet dullness of wintry Chicago skies in the Moving, Looking, Making series and the Fabula series, The Painted Way series looks down at the ground with sensibilities attuned from looking up. Once sensitized to this elegant ordinariness, distilled through the use of color, the diversity and intricacy of previously unremarked-upon views become accessible everywhere: paintings populate the streets themselves. Liquid tar brushed along the tracery of cracked asphalt surfaces echoes Brice Marden’s paintings and Sol LeWitt’s aquatints. I develop these automatic yet expressive compositions by photographing the roadway from behind the wheel of my car, projecting image after image against the silvered surface of canvas, traditional paper, or synthetic paper, and tracing one image after another to produce layered, brushy, calligraphic compositions that, like all of my work, test the distinctions of flatness and depth, expressive abstraction and straight description, nature and culture, anxiety and wonder.