I like a painting that does something, like a machine does something: you turn it on and it functions “Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina.…The retinal shudder!” — Marcel Duchamp1 shudder // shutter The click of the shutter, the click of the cliché, but lets come back to that […]

If we can see the grace in quotidian landscapes and our everyday routines then perhaps we can begin to make better choices. Gary Green, Elm City, 2015. All images: © & courtesy the artist. BEN LISLEOne of the things that strikes me first when looking at these photos is this tension between a thoroughly human […]

Engagement, baby’s mittens Engagement, baby’s mittens, ocean floor, Palermo rose, Lake Tahoe, timid white, Iguana green, blue echo, sycamore, Unspoken love, dark lilac, nighty night. Tomato tango, tint of mint, rustique, Petunia, modern romance, wild mush- Room, vintage claret, Celtic folklore, week- End get-away, alfresco, royal flush. Plum martini, Oklahoma wheat; Confetti, evening skyline, sun-kissed […]

Whereas I feel the photographs have a propensity to document, the paintings have no such obligation and as such they use the information in the photographs quite freely and make whatever is needed of the images. There is much re-drawing of the space, re-articulating, such as stepping back to get a slightly more distant view, […]

I had never before or after felt this anxiety so intensely. The jump would mean letting go of that precious section and I would have to TRUST that something else would appear — and that something would resolve and complete the painting. Brenda Goodman, Breakthrough, 1985, oil on canvas, 60 x 84 in. All images: […]

So much had already been said and photographed about Detroit’s abandonment and the so-called images of “ruin porn” that fetishized the cities misfortune, that when I first went back to explore my hometown in 2010, I began to question the motives of those who had preceded me and their intentions. After all, there were still […]

I sat on the bed and placed a canvas on the windowsill and made my first painting in America. My earliest paintings in New York, were kind of the extension of what I was doing in Tokyo, but with limited material: one small brush and five tubes of cheap oil paint. From there, over a […]

Every photographer I know, at some point in their career, has studied Walker Evans’ photographs of Hale County, Alabama made during the Great Depression. Before I made photographs, I looked to his with an almost mystical wonder and curiosity. The photographs endure as the pinnacle of what photography can and should be, as Evans himself […]

During this period, 1995 to 2000, that I created “Outland,” my work gradually shifted from documenting the world to transforming it through the camera and the deeper parts of my mind. At the same time I began to view myself as an artist/photographer rather than a photographer. The photographs came about as a result of […]

I have always been concerned with meaning, allusion and narrative – something outside “pure” painterly concerns. Barnett Newman made great “pure” paintings, but I have always felt that I was made of baser clay. I want to tell a story, even if that story is cryptic or fragmentary. Prior to 2011, the focus of my […]