AL PETERS
"...a vision to project...a tradition to sustain..." - Charles Ludlam
Painting is simply painting - and it is unlike anything else and everything else and there is nothing else which can or will ever take its place.
Painters embrace the conversation "painting" and contribute to that conversation by making their paintings. All painters everywhere and of all times invest ways of making their paintings, and this is what painting is and that is what painters do, each within the confines of personal taste, chosen influences and traditions.
Painting does not "progress" - but rather, transforms, in the work of painters.
"The only valid thing in art is that which cannot be explained." - Georges Braque
Non-objective art, like all art, is an invented, absolutely specific and unique experience. My art is not clothed in the guise of the recognizable and I am not interested in subject matter or narrative. In my work, my intent is to suggest and allude to, and the only definite thing is the exact specificity of the painting itself. My paintings are not prose - but poetry. Nor am I particularly interested in theories. No theory has ever helped me to realize, complete or finish a painting.
"...to be original, without being bizarre..." - Voltaire
I admire a great deal of art from all times and all cultures but I do make an important distinction between the great amount which I admire - and the relatively smaller amount without which my own work would not be possible.
I am and have always been gratefully nurtured, informed and sustained by a profound and unshakeable faith in the power of FORM(S).
"Thinking is more interesting than knowing but not as interesting as looking." - Goethe
- AL PETERS