“The result of this self-discovery in the studio is pain – the pain of separation, alienation, loneliness, and death. Edvard Munch…once said ‘Art emerges from joy and pain,’ and then he added, ‘Mostly from pain.’…it reminds us of something we want to forget – our suffering, our vulnerability and our weaknesses. At the deepest levels, it is the emaciated figures of Munch rather than the heroism of Michelangelo’s titans or the beauty of Rapheal’s angels that connects with us…Munch’s wound connects with our wound. We must…be led by God into the hell of self-knowledge and out again. We need to be killed and then raised from the dead…Modern art puts us back in touch with our pain and suffering, which is where art meets us, where God meets us, for we are like Melville’s Ahab: ‘gnawed within and scorched without.’ Modern art contradicts our desire to cover up this wound. It reminds us who we are in part by reminding us that there is a lot more at stake in art than representing classical stories and biblical narratives, in shaping virtue and teaching morality through images. It wrestles with our tendency to make our beliefs about ourselves and our world the center of the cosmos, to make ourselves the subjects of our existential sentences, to be, as David Foster Wallace said, ‘lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms.'” Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? Daniel Siedell, pg9 “….it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Gospel of Matthew “I like ‘Dropcloth Abstraction’, and especially the term by the artist-critic Walter Robinson: Zombie Formalism…Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just ‘new’ or ‘dangerous’-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what ‘new’ or ‘dangerous’ really is, all of it impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences…These artists are acting like industrious junior postmoderist worker bees, trying to crawl into the body of and imitate the good old days of abstraction…” Zombies on the Walls: Why does so much new abstraction look the same? Jerry Saltz, Vulture – June 2014 “The result of this self-discovery in the studio is pain – the pain of separation, alienation, loneliness, and death. Edvard Munch…once said ‘Art emerges from joy and pain,’ and then he added, ‘Mostly from pain.’…it reminds us of something we want to forget – our suffering, our vulnerability and our weaknesses. At the deepest levels, it is the emaciated figures of Munch rather than the heroism of Michelangelo’s titans or the beauty of Rapheal’s angels that connects with us…Munch’s wound connects with our wound. We must…be led by God into the hell of self-knowledge and out again. We need to be killed and then raised from the dead…Modern art puts us back in touch with our pain and suffering, which is where art meets us, where God meets us, for we are like Melville’s Ahab: ‘gnawed within and scorched without.’ Modern art contradicts our desire to cover up this wound. It reminds us who we are in part by reminding us that there is a lot more at stake in art than representing classical stories and biblical narratives, in shaping virtue and teaching morality through images. It wrestles with our tendency to make our beliefs about ourselves and our world the center of the cosmos, to make ourselves the subjects of our existential sentences, to be, as David Foster Wallace said, ‘lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms.'” Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? Daniel Siedell, pg9 “….it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Gospel of Matthew “I like ‘Dropcloth Abstraction’, and especially the term by the artist-critic Walter Robinson: Zombie Formalism…Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just ‘new’ or ‘dangerous’-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what ‘new’ or ‘dangerous’ really is, all of it impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences…These artists are acting like industrious junior postmoderist worker bees, trying to crawl into the body of and imitate the good old days of abstraction…” Zombies on the Walls: Why does so much new abstraction look the same? Jerry Saltz, Vulture – June 2014 
