Artist & Author

Text Paintings

Taking as a departure point the amusing, anonymously-authored nomenclature of house paint decks, “Classic Colors” picks fragments from the swirl of information and “content” in which we’re all swimming and set them into quasi-classification systems. The urge to name and classify all phenomena, to turn everything into a story (even the colors you choose to paint a bathroom!) is as human as apple pie.

The painting “Lifestyle Choices” goes further: concepts that seem to have no visual correlation or representation in color (e.g. universal basic income) become shaded and hued. A grid of one color is given umpteen different names: it’s not that none are factual, it’s that all are true.

These paintings represent the confluence of a wide range of themes and formal elements in my previous work: the lists and completism of Your Name Here and “All Known Metal Bands”; the aggressive neutralism of the Buffs; a Gerhard Richter painting remade in office tones (Beige Greige Putty and Taupe) is reduced to bland decor; the central theme of Make An Artist A Millionaire and Imperial Services: “work” about work / artwork as work; even the symbolic shapes and colors of The Origin & Future of the Blood.