Some Difference, 1986

Some Difference has lots in it that is the case with a lot of my work but at the same time its atypical. Piling, crowding, some curves, space, are all there as they are also elsewhere. It’s poised between pictorialism and not in a way I think is more obvious in most of my painting. I was thinking about ‘Difference’ in Derrida and Deleuze, etc.—differences indeed, but in the one deferral and in the other the kind of change described at the beginning of Difference and Repetition. It’s like, here’s some of that as stuff, or movements, or disappearing and disappearing, like that…. All my work is predicated on the fact that nothing is actually ever experienced as flat and that, as Cézanne put it, “The space of painting is already flat, the painter only has to carve it out.” Some Difference is atypical in that it presents its viewer with a more familiar pictorial space than my paintings do most of the time. What happens in this painting, in my mind and intention at least, echoes or even depends on reimagining the shallow pictorial space taken for granted by the cubist painters, unusual for my work and more like something the viewer already knows than most of what I make. Usually my paintings are much messier, the question of inside and outside untidier, more to do with Matisse, Mondrian, Malevich and Newman than what happens here. Maybe.