Artist's Statement

In 1997, I was on a trip to Italy and we had a few days in Venice. I was sketching at the edge of the Lagoon, and across the water, a church façade about 1½ kilometers away caught my attention. As I sketched the tiny form into the drawing, I found it oddly compelling, so I scrambled aboard a ferry to take me across to the island where the church was sited. It was parked on an esplanade which looked out over the lagoon. 

I sat with my sketchbook and drew the front elevation, and as I did, the methodology of the architect began to unfold itself to me. I noted the massing of the columns, the progression of spaces that led logically to the front door, the balance and the sequencing of forms. It was like listening to a great architect in a lecture explaining just exactly how he or she had composed a masterpiece. I felt oddly like I’d been in a conversation. 

After several hours , I approached the portico and read, with mouth agape, the little plaque by the front door that listed the church and the architect. San Giorgio Mafggiore; Andrea Palladio. There were tours available, but it felt like I had already been given something like an audience.

I spent a few years studying and writing about the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I visited the sites of their famous projects, I interviewed dozens of people, I read more than a few books. I spent days in the National Gallery in DC, which has a substantial collection of Christo’s drawings and sculptures. I spoke with Jeanne-Claude on the phone and came away sobered and more than a little intimidated. I visited New York for the 2005 Gates project in Central Park and observed how it transformed the pulse of the city. 

I spoke with Harry Odgers, the ambulance driver for the Valley Curtain project of 1971 in Rifle, Colorado, who paused for a moment and said, “It’s the most important thing I ever got to be a part of.” And I spoke with the owner of the restaurant in Valley Ford, CA, where Running Fence was headquartered and listened to the man’s assessment of Christo: “Everybody thinks Christo is great. I think he’s an asshole.” And I sat through a dozen Christo lectures. They were mind-numbing, duplicative, stale. (Think crackers in an MRE from the Gulf War.) It was like listening to a first-year ministry student reciting a eulogy for the career of a great artist. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a breathtaking contradiction in terms, and every effort to understand them left me impressed and bewildered in equal measure. 

I attended an Over the River lecture at a community college in Canon City in the summer of 2009. It was part of the campaign to win approval from the BLM for this ultimately unsuccessful project. Christo had claimed the controversy over his projects as an important part of the making of his art. And in the 70s, it was. He and Jeanne-Claude won over dairy farmers in rural California, and Nixonian Republicans in Rifle, Colorado, for a couple of landmark achievements. His support among the unconvinced was a stunning validation both of his work and his determination. 

What I encountered in the Over the River campaign was a dreary, suffocating public relations effort to make the local people look unreasonable and uneducated. Ironically, several of his opponents did their best to live up to that portrayal, with their contempt for Christo and anything that made its way here from a foreign country. One of them was particularly appalled at the recent inauguration of  President Obama. “I can’t do anything about that [n-----] in DC, but I will do whatever it takes to stop Christo in his tracks.” This tug of war stood in contrast to the unity they’d managed to forge with so many in the past. Can one make art that is forged in the crucible of the early 70s and expect it to survive when the social and political environs have changed around it?

As I left the community college that evening, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were sitting at a card table talking to somebody in the lecture room. I passed by in the dark outside… they were lit up like a window display at Macy’s. Indeed they did present themselves as symbols. But I also knew the larger backstory. I’d been deeply affected by the power of the work they made, as had many thousands of others. And it all rushed at me, those two famous, disappointing, cantankerous people who had lived so much, dined with presidents and cajoled dairy farmers at their kitchen tables to get what they wanted. They had made unbelievably good work. It was all there. I stood a moment in wonder, shook my head, and made my way through the parking lot for a long thoughtful drive home. 

The installation show I did in 2012 is featured here in the website. It was called Interstices. When you do an installation show, you don’t sell anything--whatever gratification you find is in getting the thing done and in the conversations that follow. And there were many for this show. And I attended the gallery much of the time it was open, so I got to talk to people I wouldn’t otherwise have met. 

The tower forms in the installation were a reference to ancient building forms--old enough to be vague and carry a message that is implied and non-specific. I was thinking of medieval fortress architecture and the built forms of the Ancestral Puebloans; the latter especially is a culture that remains swaddled in mystery. When I make solid forms like these, I am angling towards something in the creative process that is suggesting, but cannot quite be pinned down. 

A friend came to see the show with his family. One of them looked quietly for a few minutes and said, “It’s like the abandoned dwellings of a culture from another planet that we haven’t discovered yet.” I thanked them for visiting, said goodbye and sat down on the floor in the room, a little stunned. If you’ve learned a piece of music, you don’t fully understand the composition until you’ve performed it for a roomful of people. In my experience, the same goes for making art.