I began painting seriously, as it seemed to me, at the age of 13. Since then, painting has been my primary practice. Aside from painting, I make films and write about art. My films are the result of a dream I have had since early childhood to reveal the purely abstract forms of music as a kind of dramatized, dancing architecture. I began experimenting with animation as an undergraduate at Harvard. Some years afterwards, I set up an animation stand in my Staten Island studio to continue my film experiments. At length, frustrated with my technical limitations, I left for graduate school at CalArts, where I learned to work with 3-D computer animation, then in its infancy (see my 1989 film Beethoven Machinery). After CalArts I returned to Brooklyn and to painting. My first mature paintings were made in a Williamsburg loft in 1992. (For my essay about the early days of Williamsburg see my 2009 review of Brooklyn DIY.) I have continued to paint, through cycles of monochrome, limited color, and kitchen sink color, the latter condition since about 2012.
After leaving CalArts, I was always thinking about the next film, but could complete nothing until the development of a drawing practice distinct from painting— compositional and systematic rather than accidental and intuitive. These drawings had begun on isometric graph paper, but soon became a major preoccupation, culminating in a series of large-scale wall drawings at galleries and museums that took many days to install and were erased after the exhibition. During a 2003 residency at Hallwalls in Buffalo, where I installed a 4-part wall drawing, I had time to experiment with an animated version of the series, which led me back to film. A similar combination of wall drawing and animation in a 2004 installation at the Drawing Center led to my film Disobey This Command!
I have been writing about art for publication since 2002, primarily for David Cohen’s ArtCritical (more than 60 reviews), but also essays, interviews, catalogues and even fiction for various journals, including Cabinet, Bomb and The Brooklyn Rail. Writing is a sporadic part of my practice, according to occasion (for example, please see my essay on the performance work of my late friend Matt Freedman), or obsession (here I attempt to untangle the filmic threads of a Vladimir Nabokov novel).
My filmmaking is even more sporadic than my writing, but I retain my dream of synesthetic film, either in collaboration with sound artists such as Zig Gron and Douglas Henderson, or with existing music by composers such as Handel, Mozart, Schubert, or Webern. (The last two are representative of my many years of participation in the Four Walls Slide and Film Club in Williamsburg, hosted by Mike Ballou, a casual forum for serious experimentation.)
As for painting, it remains my primary and continuous practice.