Robert Burridge

My intention for this new body of work was to visually reveal a wide range of different reads in each painting without giving away the whole truth… no full disclosure.

On purpose, I wanted to manipulate the viewer into participating in the painting, teasing with secret clues to a bigger story. The individual paintings are different from each other, but share a spirit of pastiche. Even when you see the same painting several times, you experience a different feeling each time. There is usually more to see the next time.

The finished paintings surprised me. It is when I see something in the painting I’ve never seen before, it surprised me and I stop. It is that one brief moment of unexpectedness that I like in these new works.

The paintings are something that you can’t quite read as one whole truth but they have a strong feeling of “atmosphere” that you get standing in front of them. Some are clunky and unresolved - you can actually see my searching and stumbling around, doodling with paint and just stopping short of telling everything.

The titles reveal hints of what’s going on. They do their best to skirt and sidestep the whole story. However each painting is loaded with familiar rhetoric and symbolism. The “unexpected” was my central working style. Steering away from predictable slickness, I am decidedly in deKooning and Diebenkorn’s debt.

For me, the painting that holds my attention asks the question - “What’s going on here?” Then... provides the answer, “Oh, I see it.”