January 2006- Click here to see the creation of this work. I had been thinking about making a painting about confronting some kind of imaginary foe since early fall, but it wasn't until I read Don Quixote that I knew what I should do. This image is a combination of several bits and pieces of works from a wide variety of styles and periods. This image came about because I feel some what self conscious about only painting "realistically". There is always something in the back of my head saying I should do something with abstraction, so I set out to satisfy this. At the time, the leaves were changing and the woods surrounding school were looking very abstract. They were so much so that I believed even a Realist’s painting would look abstract, but I still had no idea how this would fit into my body of work thus far. The desire, however, never went away. It was so persistent that I eventually came to consider it a haunting. Now, what is a haunting without a visual manifestation? I eventually gave my ghost the face of Robert Motherwell's, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, but no one painting in particular. I decided that I would paint myself battling the ghost of the Spanish Republic paintings emerging from the trees. I planned on using Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier somehow in the image and everything, but when I started to prepare for it, I decided it couldn't be done and the concept was too shaky. It wasn't until Don Quixote that I realized how I could pull it off (I cannot explain the whole Spanish theme).

Don Quixote's only flaw is his strict adherence to a particular ideology, and worse yet, an ideology that doesn't fit his times. I get the sense sometimes that I am fixed ideologically on Realism in appearances. Worse yet, I am not sure if my adherence is appropriate for the times or not. I also identify with Don Quixote in that I feel as if my way of seeing things is the right way and that my paintings are right. I differ in him in that I am not sure whether I am trying to revive something from the past, as he knowingly did, or whether I am doing something new and relevant. And, I am not alone. However the existence of other painters working the same way doesn’t give me much confidence because the existence of other knights errant in Quixote’s time wouldn’t have made him any less mad. Anyway, Don Quixote aside, my concerns about the "legitimacy" of my style are founded because I have seen through others that it isn’t necessarily legitimate. I have identified what I hope is only a particular camp within Realists (I use the term “Realist” loosely. Sometimes, however not rightly synonymously with realistic) from my days in school. These Realists abhor abstraction and everything that has been accomplished the last 112 or so years. They long for the return of "quality" and "proper this" and "proper that". The only thing they appreciate about abstraction was its ballsy, "This is the only true painting" attitude. They also harbor a deep belief that sometime in the future art historians will see things their way and erase abstraction, or at least turn it into a footnote. It is this camp that I hope to never be identified with because they are exactly like Don Quixote. I don’t think I belong to this group, however my only bit of proof is I like abstract works and I desire to work abstractly. Unfortunately I haven't been able to do it, and actions speak louder than words I’ve heard. Hmmmmm.

Originally this painting actually had abstract parts. Compositionally it didn't work, and I soon discovered why. The scene is not from my perspective/point of view, but from the perspective of none other than my Sancho. Sancho never saw what Quixote saw! That is one of the great things about objective/Realist work; the viewer gets to have a kind of out of body experience that frequently involves time travel! That may seem outlandish but it isn’t. When you look at any painting that abides by the rules of perspective you are seeing from someone else’s perspective, for example when you look at/an image of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, you are looking through his eyes from 570 years ago, honestly. In this example you are explicitly Van Eyck, (he goes so far as to not only paint his reflection in a mirror, but he writes 'Johannes de Eyck fuit hic') however in other images the artist leaves the issue of who’s perspective it is up to the viewer. I try to never be “me looking at myself”. I am not interested in you looking through my eyes. Instead, I want to look through “your” eyes at myself, so this image was a departure for me in that I decided to see myself through the eyes of someone playing my Sancho. I plan to play around with this in the future.

Mondrian's Grey Tree, 1911, was my image for the "ghost of abstraction" in this work. Motherwell was too hard to fit in. Mondrian is famous for his minimal compositions of mostly primary colors, black and white. This is an early work and marks an important transition in his body of work as I see it. Mondrian's earliest work was Fauvist (Matisse like) and featured such notable things as flowers and landscapes. I imagine that under the influence of Cubism, which had only hit the scene four or five years earlier, and possibly comforted by the development of Braque’s work, which had been Fauvist before he co-created the Cubist "movement" with Picasso, Mondrian shifted gears and opted for a very minimal palette and painted this wonderful tree. What I enjoy most about this painting is the play between positive and negative space. The branches and the spaces in between the branches shift back and forth. Sometimes the grey is the "object" and then immediately the black becomes the object. It's a simple exercise that every art student, including myself, has had to play around with or demonstrate in numerous projects and assignments, and after repeating this effect time after time as a student, I eventually started to see this disorienting shift in all kinds of works, including realistic works. I decided this painting could easily be integrated into my painting of trees. I also chose this as my "ghost" because Mondrian is a tragic figure in my eyes. He, like many abstract/non-representational artists, believed working as he did would lead to some kind of truth or transcendental something or other. His rationale was, “What could be more pure, true, and transcendental than art pared down to its absolute essentials?” To Mondrian, this meant a careful and balanced play between the basic concepts of form and color. He dedicated his life to rearranging the same 5 components, white, black, yellow, red, and blue, over and over again in a monotonous and almost mechanical manner. I understand that it can be argued I am doing the same thing. All of my paintings can easily be created using only white black, red, yellow, and blue, and that I frequently employ the same compositional tricks again and again, but this is really true of everyone because its basic color theory, but Mondrian was an extreme case. The real tragedy is his legacy was not having found some truth, but rather having created something art students moan and groan about. I hope my oeuvre never becomes an "exercise" for anyone. Click here to play a game about Mondrian's art and his ghost.

Another piece that inspired the pose was this bronze from Bernward's Doors in St. Michael’s Cathedral in Hildesheim, Germany. It shows god discovering, confronting and condemning Adam and Eve. I have never seen this in person but I love it. I have been thinking for some years of using it. I expected the first time I would use it would be in a painting of my cat Bernini pointing at me saying "You fool!", but I haven't made that painting yet, so I used it first in this one.