Strange Things

 

From the Prospect Park series, oil on panel, 2011

 

It was a Friday night, mid-summer, at Elise Giardella’s salon, Presenting at 17. In a room of eight or ten people, I had already been presenting for twenty minutes when there was a knock at the door. The late Kanishka Raja entered the darkened room, shuffling around chairs and legs to an empty seat three or four feet from me. On the screen were paintings from my Prospect Park series, among many other images I showed that evening. At Presenting, the artist could speak about anything of interest—any tangential item an artist might think about at the perimeter of their practice. I took full advantage of that by discussing my writing, sharing related images, as well as my work.

Raja was impatient. Our relationship was already pretty thin and when we did find ourselves in the same company, there was occasional friction. Frankly, I was surprised to see him at all that evening. Why had he come? On the surface, we shared little. I couldn’t recall speaking with him about my work or his. Yet there he was, on a Friday night in New York City. He could have been anywhere, but he was there waiting for me to finish my monologue about landscape, nature, and culture. Finally, when the lights had been turned on, he was able to ask the one question he had interrupted his evening for—why are your paintings so strange?

At first, I wondered if he could not articulate the reason for himself, but then I thought that maybe he just wanted me to say it, to confirm what he had already thought. I still do not know why he went out of his way that night. The whole episode seemed rather performative: the knock at the door mid-presentation, the entry, the interruption, the impatient sitting, and then one question. I don’t recall what my answer was for him that night and I wish I did, but I am not sure it matters much now. 

When I graduated from my graduate program, I emerged into a painting scene that had begun to be dominated by abstraction. At Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the summer just after graduation, I had heard from artists in the prime of their careers that abstraction in painting would be the only way forward. What no one had learned that summer, possibly because they never thought to ask, was how in love with abstraction I had been, since a teen looking at art in New York. 

In undergraduate school, I learned painting from mid-twentieth-century artists—old men who were all about to retire or pass. Because my early work was influenced by landscape structure, I was informed then that I should never try to make a career within that genre. After graduation, I absorbed painting ideas never spoken about in school. I also became aware that I had few drawing skills or the motivation to learn. In what seemed a vast period of time, between undergrad and grad school, I also realized that my painting was largely emotional labor—something I did not recognize as a skill until much later. 

So, at twenty-seven, I went to grad school to learn how to observe, to draw, and that led me to paint en plein air. This practice wasn’t what I had intended, nor was it a lark. It was an intuitive understanding of what was necessary to bring that earlier emotional skill under control. The space in which I had chosen to do this was intentional. While most go to school to learn under people they admire, I chose New Mexico for a different reason— the connection, felt several years earlier, I had to the land and the sense that it had something to teach me. I trusted my intuition despite not knowing what would come of it. After twelve months of figure drawing, I was ready to paint in a wholly new way.

Mountain No. 1, oil on panel, 2000

 

That work, plein air landscape of the mesas and hills around me, in the Chihuahua Desert, is the maturation of many of my prior interests. Intuition landed me a spot among sixty-four at Skowhegan, but I struggled with how my work fit into the space of contemporary art. Yet there I was. What I understand now is that the jury, some of them faculty, saw something exceptional in the work, yet they had difficulty articulating what that was. Maybe they saw a story written in Latin, with little idea how to translate it, let alone how it could move forward.

It wasn't as if I didn't know that landscape, certainly in the register of en plein air, was a dead language. It was this death of a genre that allowed me to speak through it; able to reinvent it as wholly my own. Abstraction, emotion, and landscape, came together in the practice of en plein air. If all that was seen was another landscape painting, sadly that dismissal meant a refusal to see the engine behind the work—something always more important than how work presents at a glance.  

For the sake of story-telling brevity, I now must package influence, thought and experience into a small container—one that can be unpacked another time. With this in mind, I jump to 2009: after economic collapse, two years writing about parks and gardens, years of painting  that struggled to resolve, and a month as artist-in-residence at Weir Farm (a park). In that year, I began a new series. These paintings compressed the emotional labor of my pre-grad abstraction, photographic mediation, the observation of plein air painting, awkward color, and the familiar spaces of Prospect Park, Brooklyn. With this work, I bring the conversation back to Kanishka’s one question.

In what does this strangeness lie?

In part, it is restraint. In the context of my work, restraint is a form of controlled emotion, but not to make things neat. Instead, it is deliberate containment: a way to shape how the viewer encounters feeling. In these paintings, restraint turns emotion into a structural element, rather than outlet for narrative or expressiveness.

By stripping the emotion of narrative, expression, or catharsis, it leaves it suspended and unmoored; it is experienced as pressure rather than message. Emotion is treated the way abstraction treats color or form, but it refuses translation. It is present and alive—enough to be felt, but not fully discharged. What has been abstracted isn’t form, but emotion.

Another element of the strange in my work is emotional ambiguity bound to the familiar in the form of Prospect Park. These paintings look as though they should explain themselves—the park is recognizable, legible, ordinary—and yet they don’t. The park is not wilderness, but neither is it fully social. It is regulated, designed, and enclosed. It is part ecosystem, part social infrastructure, part recreation ground, and they carry the anxieties and tensions of that hybrid status. 

This condition is made visible, so that viewers must confront how even green space can feel alienating in contemporary urban life. The paintings become an intimate psychological chamber, whose spatial emptiness can be filled by the viewer’s own relationship to public landscape. These park spaces are not merely seen, they are felt. Yet they don’t tell you what to feel—they make you aware that you are feeling.

All of this is heightened by the imposed viewpoint resembling that of a person already present in the park. That positioning is intentional: it places the viewer inside the painted space without offering a stable point of orientation or narrative footing. The result is a sustained psychological unease: the viewer feels present, attentive, and quietly unsettled, caught between certainty and incomprehension, and aware of their own act of looking. The lingering tension is that of being inside the scene yet denied any understanding of it.

Now anchor that tension to a field of green. A long time ago, a professor told me never to make a green painting (or a landscape, for that matter). Despite this possibly sound advice, I chose to make these paintings almost entirely green, compounding the sense of strange. How? Green is a neutralizing color, which can be unsettling where excessive because it lacks the emotional cues of other colors. Green, then, can act as a kind of emotional camouflage. These paintings deliver so much green that they appear gentle and approachable, while quietly intensifying their sense of estrangement. The little tonal or chromatic contrast I allowed prevents the eye from resting or easily exiting the space. Instead, the eye is held inside a field of color. Nature, encoded as green, becomes a container rather than a refuge. By letting green dominate, I accepted its flattening, deadening tendencies and turned them into psychological content. 

The result of all these choices, are paintings that are too psychologically charged to be decorative, too restrained to be cathartic, too familiar to be comfortably strange, and too strange to be comfortably familiar. The eye moves, but meaning doesn’t settle. In response, viewers begin to test possibilities, linger, hesitate, and return. They negotiate the situation, eliciting mental activity in response to the painting’s emotional uncertainty. The act of looking becomes slow, recursive, and self-aware—more like thought than perception. When painting can withhold thought, it forces the viewer to carry it instead.

My youthful love of abstraction and its emotional uncertainty had been funneled into realism. A paradox: painting that looks like it should explain itself, but doesn’t. Viewers feel both drawn in and resistant when confronted by work that promises legibility and then quietly breaks that promise. This comes without spectacle or irony. The work also won’t tell you what to feel, doesn’t resolve the discomfort, nor does it aestheticize confusion. It may be a burden—the quiet transfer of unresolved feeling from painting to viewer, but it begs the question: How much should a painting give and what is the viewer responsible for? 

A little late Kanishka, but thank you for coming out on a New York City summer's night and asking the question. In your own way, you showed up for my work, in a way that few had.* 

Kanishka Raja sleeping: from a small series of quick paintings of participants asleep, 2000

*John O'Connor, Steve Locke, Ridley Howard, Carrie Mae Weems, Jenn Viola, Felix Esquivel, Amy Finkbeiner and, of course, Betsy Alwin are on the top of that list of artists who have showed up for my work. I am grateful.