David Brody paintings 20 march - 20 april 1998       A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines: Region 28, 1996 48" x 96" acrylic on canvas         A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines: Region 26, 1996 48" x 96" acrylic on canvas         A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines: Region 29, 1996 48" x 96" acrylic on canvas       It's laziness that prevents me from having a "vision" or an "idea." laziness keeps me alert, hoping to finish a painting in five strokes. (they'd have to be the right five strokes.) laziness gets me in deep trouble. i'd like to follow my thoughts until they have as much heft and rigor as, say, the anchorage of the williamsburg bridge. but i get sidetracked. i get lost in the painting process, like an acidhead who thinks he can conjure the entire cosmos out of the swirly formica of a table at burger king - structure within structure within structure. this delusion has no patience for strategy - for thinking ahead - and it antagonizes any instance of symmetry until it collapses in a heap of possibilities; mere repetition is impossible in this state of mind. such honest labor seems beneath its nearly paralyzing mania. it probably amounts, therefore, to a species of laziness. but if so, it's my best asset: laziness is the mother of invention. sometimes i think of myself as a lapsed purist - a gestural painter who eats red meat. my images, which proceed entirely out of gestures and marks, seem nevertheless preoccupied with an almost architectural space. it's as if i were trying to make abstract paintings of things. and it's crucial to understand that, in my wisdom, i have no idea what things. or what space, or how to go about any of it. all i know to do is to prod these marks hopefully for structure. my mantra is, just look. i want to make paintings as complex and resolved as a cathedral, or an organism, or a v-8 engine. but i'm not the least bit interested in paintings of cathedrals, organisms, or machines. what i am interested in are the kinds of problems involved in building some such thing out of, say, twigs. it can't be done at all, but a dim awakening of subject matter is liable to happen along the way - this thing. Perhaps an awkward, stubborn thing, a dumb thing, but a thing.   david brody 1998   photography this page: john berens
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