NOTE: This is the text of the lecture on my work that I delivered at Idyllwild on Monday, 30 June 2008. I stuck close to these words, although I deviated from them on occasion to make jokes.

First of all, thank you to Roland for inviting me to come to Idyllwild. I am truly envious of those of you who are in residence here.

I’m going to do something a little unusual in my talk. Instead of showing images of my work, commenting on them one at a time while I show them, I’m going to offer general remarks about my painting — more or less scattered remarks — while slowly showing you the images, presented in rough chronological order.

Every time I talk about my work, I get a little discombobulated. I make contradictory and different statements with each new discussion, which makes me wonder if I really know even one thing about my paintings. I mean, if I can’t come up with a consistent verbal discussion about my own work, do I have any principles as an artist at all?

The answer is yes, I do. I have visual principles that show up in my paintings — things I repeatedly and insistently reiterate. I always have to remind myself that the problem comes about only when I step back to talk about my own work. Then is when I can’t get a full grasp of what it is I’m doing. While I’m working, I probably can’t say much about what it is I’m doing, but my brush seems to know what to do. This is partly habit, and partly just the nature of any action — you don’t “know” it verbally. You know it through “doing” it.

In general, I subscribe to a principle my husband introduced me to — that he learned from someone else, I forget who — that artists should be seen and not heard. But there’s a time and place to yammer on a little about your own work, and this is one of them.

I’ve always stuck with painting and drawing. Never made an installation, never made a work of sculpture, never studied photography. When I went to college, I majored in political philosophy, and all I ever studied in studio art was painting and drawing — never ceramics, or design, or sculpture, or anything else. How I ever got into graduate school I don’t know — it was easier back then, when I applied. Mostly I got in because of luck. In any event, I did get into graduate school, and it was good for me — mostly because it was a place where I could hang my hat as an artist for a couple of years.

For me, reciting a litany of, “First I did this, back when I was in art school,” and “then I did this, a few years later,” or “I’ve always been interested in this,” or, “After I went to visit Hungary I decided to do this,” even if I were sincere in doing it, and even if it’s something other artists do rather easily, would be a dreary event. All I’d see would be the hard evidence revealing that I’m slow to discover what I’m doing in my own painting.

Yet that’s the kind of painter I am — sort of turtle-like, plodding along at my own, doddery pace. My painting is an exceedingly slow business — built up over days, weeks, even months. I paint only about 12 to 15 paintings a year — working them up two or four at a time. For the past two decades, I’ve stuck to a small scale of around 36 × 34 inches.

I’ve always used oil paints — I tried acrylic early on but couldn’t stand the texture and surface, and couldn’t control the color. I like gloss, which is the wet look natural to oils. I like to build color depth through glazing. If you know about glazing, you know you have to be exceedingly patient because you have to wait for the underlayers to dry completely before applying the next thin coat of paint. Glazing disciplines me — it makes me go slower than I already do, by nature.

My way of painting, which I developed through a combination of experiments, reading about how Old Master painters did things, listening to suggestions from a few influential teachers, and empirically observing certain effects if I did X and then Y to a painting, is utterly unsuited to the fast times in which we live. But if you’re a painter, you do what you have to do.

A long time ago, a painter I know told me that he thought artists are people who discover, sometime around the age of seven, that there’s something profoundly wrong with the world. I think that about sums up why I paint. The world disappoints me, but painting doesn’t. I make paintings as a relief from the real world. At bottom, I’m an idealist, although I don’t practice that in my real life. Too much idealism in real life is dangerous — it leads to authoritarianism. In art, however, idealism has its place.

Like most artists, I’m reasonably ambitious, which means I want my art to be favorably recognized in my own times. At this point in my career, however, and having finally reached what I like to call a “mature age,” I can see that that’s not going to happen in any sort of big way — not now, and not in the future. It’s not just because of me. It’s the times. But it’s OK. I said I’m “reasonably ambitious” — not “deeply ambitious.”

I’m not a revolutionary, nor even particularly rebellious. I like the four edges of a painting — the boundaries of the game of painting. About 20 years ago, I found I’d painted myself right back into the early American modernism of the 1930s. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened that my sensibility led in that direction. Painters see an awful lot of paintings over the years, in museums and galleries, and they absorb what they see and use what they need. Just as Jane Austen’s heroines always accepted the limitations of their confined, restrictive society in the early 19th century, pushing their freedom only within those boundaries, I accept painting’s deep limitations, and find my freedom only within its confined borders.

I’m not so happy with the limitations of human beings, however, and though I don’t think we can ever be perfect, I think we can be better than we are.

I put heavy pressure on my own art for it to be perfect. If I see a tiny stray brush hair in a surface, for example, I can’t let it alone. When I paint an edge, I never use straight edges or tape. I have to do it all alone, with my hand, sort of to prove that I can do it. A machine’s perfection bores me, but a hand’s perfection—as in Memling’s, or Van Eyck’s, or Vermeer’s—moves me to tears.

Considered as a whole—balancing everything I know from reading history, philosophy and fiction—I think modern times, even with their self-inflicted miseries of the soul, and their many man-made, technologically-caused disasters—including global warming—are better than previous times. Antibiotics alone are worth the price of modern displacement and anxiety. Call me naïve, but I think it will be a long time before human beings, and our planet, disappear entirely. That’s part of the tragedy of human existence, in fact—not because it’ll end, but precisely because, even with all its evils, it will stagger on.

I never liked all of modern art. My disposition can’t tolerate very much of the anxious, angry, ugly side of it. I was always drawn to the optimistic, joyful side, however—the side that liberated color from tone, and the side that made playing around with form for its own sake exciting and beautiful. I don’t like Picasso all that much, although I recognize he’s the revolutionary. It’s Gris that I like. It’s Gris—the one who took Picasso’s revolution and stayed within its boundaries—who made the beautiful, ordered modernism I love.

I like art since the sixties whenever it unexpectedly offers up delights by using a playful approach to new materials. But I can’t stand it when it’s disgusting (Paul McCarthy) or brutal (Carroll Dunham and his gun-up-the-ass paintings). As a friend of mine said, “The world doesn’t need this stuff brought into it.” I’m admit I’m fairly thin-skinned in my taste. Still, I’ll put up with a lot merely because I hope that through constant looking I’ll bump into something odd and unexpected in contemporary art that strikes me as beautiful. That takes some work at this point, when the “form and pressure of our times” (to quote the overquoted quotation from Shakespeare) asks for just about anything except beauty.

Where I still try to make something beautiful (and I’m not alone in this, although we who do this are in the minority), and take pleasure in doing it in a modest way, a lot of the best and most serious contemporary artists have turned their backs on beauty. Instead they make art, often super-sized, that tackles just about everything except beauty. Interests range from sex and death to politics, race, ethnicity, popular culture, spiritualism, other cultures, religion, math, science and the theoretical underpinnings of art itself.

Me, I’ve stuck with beauty considered in the purest and narrowest sense, as something where the visual parts fit into a whole in a pleasing way, and where there’s a balance and harmony of the parts with the whole. That I happened to find it in abstract painting—and a peculiar kind of abstract painting that had its highest moments in America in the 1930s—is my bad luck (in terms of fitting with my times). But again, that’s the way it goes, if you are honest about your sensibilities—which is all you can do as an artist. Even talking about “the whole,” or “the parts,” is pretty anachronistic. It marks me as old-fashioned and clearly not on board with what’s hot now.

Beauty is a very threatening idea to our egalitarian principles. It stands out by being, well, beauty. It’s exceptional. It differs from the pack of stuff we see, which is ordinary, or average. Just as the charge of “elitism” can threaten a political leader in a democracy, charges of “beauty,” odd as it may seem, threaten artists. Beauty seems shallow, compared to “ideas.” To compound the problem, when art is about beauty, it’s often as boring as all get out.

If Plato is right—if you do become what you imitate—those of you who are here for this residency at Idyllwild will aggravate this beauty problem I’m talking about once you really get going with your art in a professional way. As reasonable artists on your way up, you’ll be deeply tempted to imitate the art that gets the most attention, and these days, it’s more apt to be Takashi Murakami than a small painting that just sits there, veritably shouting out loud that its purpose is merely to be good-looking.

My struggle with proportion and balance—in shapes, colors and the texture of paint itself—reflect, in my little world view, in an imperfect way, my search for what I believe is an ultimately unknowable, but fundamental, order in the universe.

If I sound a lot like the deeply despised Plato, well, you’ve got that part right. Painting demonstrates to me exactly how much I am a mixed-up batch of modern and premodern ideas. Yes, I believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, and accept all its ideas about randomness and accident. But at the same time, I don’t feel any of that. Yes, I believe (what I understand) of quantum theory, with its ideas of chaos, but at the same time, I can’t believe the universe is just a matter of accident. Yes, Kant was right about how our brains impose themselves on the world around us, and that the world is never really discoverable to us. But at the same time, against all odds, I really believe there is a whole world out there, beyond language.

If I didn’t believe these things, I couldn’t paint. What would be the point? I’m not like my husband, wrestling in paint with an existential anxiety. Nor am I an expressionist. I don’t want to “express myself” in paint. I express myself all the time—in words—and just by living. To me, self-expression at this point in history is a tired motive for painting. It’s a watered-down, romantic idea that’s run its course and led us to nothing but nihilism and navel-gazing.

I found Peter Clothier’s remarks here last night very beautiful and compelling. Yet as I pondered them afterwards, I realized I disagreed with his idea that a painting should just “be.” I see his point—trying to relieve the pressure on painting to be all things for all people, and to be something that can be conquered or controlled by words.

But the way I see things, that’s what plants and trees and cows should do—just be. A painting should be more than that. It should mean something—to whit, something larger than what it is materially, and something larger than an expression of the self. Sorry, but abstract expressionists got it all wrong. The paintings look great, of course. But painting implodes when it focuses too compulsively on the self’s innermost feelings.

In the end, I don’t ask as much of painting as others do. I don’t ask it to save the planet, or our souls, or solve our political problems, or express mathematical or scientific ideas. I don’t ask it to tear out its roots, which lie in the art of decoration, and become pure philosophy or concept. I don’t ask it to push away what it’s so naturally suited to do—what it’s done for centuries, and in almost every culture on earth—please the eye. I don’t resent painting for being sensuous. I don’t blame it for being limited—to its surface, and what it looks like.

I don’t think it can ever be as deep as philosophy, although it can be deeply philosophical. I don’t think it can be asked to move people to tears, or work them into a frenzy of emotion or passion, the way music or theater does. I don’t ask it to instruct me in anything, although it can do that, as an aside. I don’t think it needs to illustrate anything, although it can do that as well.

I’m not bitter that painting’s role in our culture has declined since the age of Velázquez, and that more people would rather look at movies than look at paintings. Nor am I upset at the bourgeois takeover of painting, which happily sees paintings as things to hang on the wall over the couch.

I accept the natural and historical fate of painting, which is to say that I accept its static and still nature and that it’s never going to be wildly popular.

But when the likes of Takashi Murakami try to take over painting, I get angry. He can do what he wants, but he’ll never be a painter.

Ok, you’re probably thinking, so what is it you ask painting to mean? I ask of it this: Hold my eye, whatever kind of painting you are. Give me something more than an image—something that I can linger on, for pleasure, in both its parts and its whole, for longer than two seconds. Give me something that has to be inside those four edges. Do all this in a such a way that I want to return to it, repeatedly, and am able to find something of that same experience I had the first time I saw it when I return to it.

More simply, surprise me and move me with a beauty I’ve never quite seen before. If you do that, dear painting, you’ve done enough.