I have always been drawn to how the mysterious movement of imagination inspires action; to a reverence for the power of accident, chance and first choices in life and in art. I'm most content, engaged when following that inner voice or eye, trusting my own 'street sense' and abandoning all precious notions of style. I don't mind a mess or making one. Photo-realism, single-point-perspective, traditional representation is beyond my skill and interest.

 

“Primitive” art, the caves of Altimira and Lascaux, the Zen brush, my childhood memory of finger painting and coloring outside the lines in coloring books are best metaphors.

 

I aspire to end any idleness in me without losing my hunger for true leisure and my ability to create important windows of totally open time and what grows from that.

 

Painting for me is like downhill skiing: a rapid, exhilarating descent through form and color, trusting one's intuition, skill and nerve REAL TIME.

 

In the words of one of my favorite poets, Frank O'Hara: “You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola prep.” And then, in harsh light of day or next day, I save only what has life, feels right and strong. Then burn or trash the rest.

 

The wholesale demotion and demolition of conventional wisdom is every artist's obligation. Essential to the process is irreverence married to arrogance and faith in the importance of making it new, each day, making it new for all to see.

 

The best artists - those famous, those unknown, those yet to be “discovered”, the outliers (I consider myself one) always have one eye on the past, one eye looking questioningly into the mirror, the empty score, page, paper or canvas of the present-to-become-future. My favorite painters, the ones I'm always looking back to for inspiration and strength, are Picasso, Matisse, Hockney, Braque, Morandi, VanGogh and Chardin, the artists who inspired each of them, too many of the moderns to mention and 'most everything children do.

 

Giorgio Morandi, often called “a purist” by critics, had no interest in graphic representation. He said that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we can actually see. He disdained what he called “the easy popularity” of trompe-l'oeil, magic-realism artists who “trick their viewers into becoming admirers" through academic prowess. Instead he invited viewers of his work to join him on a journey of his work, imperfections and all, that to some may appear on first blush naïve. He said, “…my only ambition is to enjoy the peace and quietude I find in painting.”

 

Morandi’s as unfashionable a notion today as Matisse's view which I embrace: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

 

That the right people, especially kindred spirits, those one respects and loves, will admire or even buy one's work is ‘gravy on the fries.

Gregory J. Furman