6. The way things are arranged is meaningful. 7. Order is unavoidable. 8. I admit that objects in the room interfere with my behavior. 9. While I am in the room, I admit that I feel vulnerable. 10. Locks are a necessity. 11. Escape is binding. I don’t finish drawings. I exhaust the possibilities in each rendering. I revise and rework and more than likely destroy drawings. The last couple of years, only three drawings survived. I draw until the figure and the environment have weight―plasticity and narrative. I draw until I find a hook that sustains my viewing for more than a couple of days. If that hook doesn’t last, then I go back to revising. Whatever began the drawing―the studies, the images from my boxes―is started again when I pick up my piece of charcoal. Because the mark is not the idea, I have to battle what making that mark means. Does it define the outside or the inside of the object? Is it defining a texture, a contour, or a tone? Since all of us have mark making down, we think it’s automatic. At its fundamental level, a drawing is a progressively complex listing of strokes. Nothing more. To assume that you can go to a metaphor before controlling and manipulating the material is ridiculous. That’s not to say that you don’t have a start. I have plenty of starts, plenty of ideas, but once you are on the paper it’s a whole different game.
22: Talking about some of your early paintings, you mention that they are “like candy,” in that their element of perfection is also their downfall.
DB: Regarding painting, I can paint; I just don’t like to. I have no color sense, but that isn’t neces-
sary for painting. I use a universal mud theory―any color will work if it contains trace amounts of any other color in the painting―and a well-drawn understudy. Together they allow me to paint as well as anybody. The problem is with the act of painting. In periods when I did paint and I had everything under control—my palette, my brush—I seemed to go into a trance. Nothing I mixed was wrong, every brush stroke and position was spot on, and the painting developed without any hesitation. While I didn’t dislike the paintings, there was no resistance to their development and if there was no resistance, no feedback, no ‘blow-back,’ then there was no meaningful experience in the process―no life. If there was no meaningful experience other than the technical finesse, then how could I expect my viewers to have one? The process tasted good but had no substance. Milton Resnick talked about the pit artists fall into when their work ceases to have meaning. The artist remembers that anxiety and trauma and seeks anything to keep out of that pit. For some, the development of gimmicks or tricks keeps them from the pit, but once the artist uses those tricks to avoid the pit, he dies as an artist. I felt like painting was avoiding the real issues of making art. If I define myself as an artist, then my approach must be a constant battle with the pit.
22: Tell me a little about your idea of expression and emotion in work and how it is tied to the expres-
sive or “human” mark (ideas like scratching, smoothing, rubbing, etc). Do you think leaving a “trail” is the most effective form of human communication?
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