This manifested in several ways. Technically, the paint used would shift during the drying phase of the work so that it created form independent of my control. Coupled with a self-imposed limitation of using primary colors, which acted like a mantra, this allowed me to confront unexpected form while layering a conceptual framework throughout the paintings. This combination became a kind of alchemy in which I could discover new arrangements of spatial interaction. The images that emerged were both logical, relying on mathematical proportion, and intuitive as I was not sure why they had meaning for me. The resulting compositions created certain visual and emotional tensions which seemed to synthesize on various micro and macro levels.
As the symbolic form deteriorated into a more linear and interrelated mark-making the paintings began to take on a different energy. I began to doubt the construct of composition. As I began to abandon conscious composition I wanted to avoid the trap of the pseudo- automatic. In the paintings of early 1990 symbolic form had all but disappeared from the paintings. Now in the paintings, like a swirling soup of color and line, there seemed to be a more pure potential being generated. This seemed a potential for energy to coalesce and create “possibility”. The paintings now seemed to be a record of this potential, not in the way Pollock's “I am nature"drips record his activity (which becomes an aesthetic idea) but an actual visual image of potential and coalescence.
Twenty years later, having in the meantime, read about the work of thinkers such as Stuart Kaufmann, Humberto Maturana, and Ilya Prigogine, among others, who have put forth the notion that systems can be self-organizing and that creation happens at the edge of chaos, I have co-opted those ideas (in a poetic sense) to help me describe now what I didn’t have language for back then. I would now say that these later paintings revealed a visual memory of the potential of self-organization and creation. While I doubt that I would have ever come to this language on my own (I privately and arrogantly thought of them as portraits of God - although the notion is not so ridiculous if you read about Kaufmann's ideas about the origins of life), I find it intriguing that I arrived at a similar notion through visual means. Perhaps it is possible that somehow this potential could be "remembered" by someone who was a product of it.
These paintings were made at the old Pabst Brewery in Los Angeles, hence the classification.
