The Gift

When I first began painting in college in the early 1980s, my art and art history professors referred to paintings as pictures—even the non-objective ones. I don’t hear the word used much in that context anymore. Maybe we have objectified canvases so much in the past four decades that we think of them more in physical rather than pictorial terms. I have always thought of my drawings and paintings as pictures—no matter how abstract. For me frames around my paintings have always been windows onto the spaces those pictures imagine.  In The Gift, the large frame around the central image is my attempt to create a conceptual and physical bridge between the picture’s objective and subject natures.