The Landscape as Vocabulary, chapter 17 from The Works

2005

After The Odyssey, my work became quieter.

Not because I was looking for less, but because I wanted to look more closely.

I began painting small landscapes.

They were never intended as places.They were not memories of mountains or distant horizons.

They were attempts to understand how little was needed before a landscape could begin to exist.

One line.

One mass.

One movement of paint.

The paintings became smaller, but the questions became larger.

Each work was a variation on the previous one.Some dissolved into silence.Others became dense and almost geological.Some consisted of little more than a single gesture suspended in space.

Without realizing it, I had started building a visual vocabulary.

Like a musician practicing scales, or a poet returning to the same handful of words, I repeated the same forms over and over again.

Not to arrive at an answer,but to discover what the forms themselves wanted to become.

Looking back, I see that these paintings were never studies.

They were the beginning of a language that would continue to unfold over the years—in paintings, ceramics, scrolls, and eventually in the work I make today.

"Home is where one starts from."T. S. Eliot

"Works of art are of an infinite loneliness." Rainer Maria Rilke