Making Connections and Imagining Possibilities

Thomas Nozkowski

Untitled (8-104), 2008
oil on linen on panel
22" x 28" (55.9 cm x 71.1 cm)

My last entry got me thinking even more about the kinds of rules or ideas that govern the choice of subject matter for my work. So much of a proper explanation still escapes me, and commonalities or links have yet to be made in bodies of work that I have yet to create. I read a fantastic interview with the American abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski in the art magazine Turps Banana.

Everything he said in this interview harked back to the many questions I bring up when thinking about creative stimulus, trends within my work, questions of originality and style. Nozkowski's background is in the abstract expressionist movement in the 60s in New York (where he currently lives and works). Despite this solid foundation, however, he made a point to liberate himself from any strict rules to an aesthetic that could be associated to a trend or school of artists. He rebelled against large canvas work and shifted to small scale paper or panel. He strayed as long as he could from ever developing a style of his own, where he valued experimentation over a signature identity.

What he said about being a young artist was the most encouraging to me:

The hardest thing I have ever had to do as an artist is to become an older artist. I actually know how to make a Nozkowski now, and that can be a real trap. As a young artist, you don't know what you are capable of, you don't know where something is going to take you, you can succeed or you can fail. It's very exciting and it fills you with energy. Everything is an adventure.

I sometimes put a lot of pressure on myself for not having an apparent style that links all my work together. I don't even sign my work the same way all the time! This seems to be a common trap for a lot of younger artists, which can be distracting, and in fact, misleading. Individuality will come through no matter what. What the artist decides to use as a source for their work is what brings out the very nature of the artist themselves. Because "why would you look at one thing and not something else?"

People often ask, how do you know when a painting is finished? A painting is finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place. I am looking for the moment when I can say "I get it now".

Nozkowski also claims that art is, in fact, very personal to the artist, and that the meaning behind a piece of work can be translated in an entirely different way by the viewer. He learned long ago to accept this fact and not to let it affect the way he works.

The key experience for any artist in all the arts, is the solitariness of the studio, the thousands of hours we spend alone with our work. Time passes; we paint and watch this object grow. The most complex web of associations and connections develops from fleeting stuff to long skeins of connections. We remember things, reference ideas, imagine possibilities. There is so much that crosses our minds as we paint, so much I think it's folly to imagine another person being able to even come close to the richness we create for ourselves in our work. The only interesting meaning a work of art can have is that another human made it, another consciousness exists and that consciousness could imagine something so beautiful or so rich and complex...