More, 2010

**studies for More, 2010**

I think of abstract or nonrepresentational painting as ongoing and unending, because every generation feels the atmosphere around it and it’s abstraction that articulates it. Barnett Newman said he wanted to express the inexpressible. I want to present complexity, which by definition is the moment I am living in. I understand that others find what Hegel called the spirit of the age or the World spirit in signs and I do too, but it’s in the non-relationships between movements, and the properties of colors, that the present is most obviously visible in my view. My painting More is made out of colors and movements drawn basically from four sources: the colors of the crappy plastics of the DDR for the upper left; the under the sea fight in Beowulf in the lower left; the colors of fashion magazines in the lower right; iridescence as a condition of light and surface in the upper right. Together these qualities make a world of activity that is driven by their origins, but not wholly returnable to them because they’ve become more and also something else than they were.