Thoughts on painting

What direction? What path do I want to follow? Where do I want my painting exploration to lead? Looking back at my early paintings, as I have been doing, at a time where I painted what I felt like on a given day or week, whatever struck my fancy, makes me consider where I would like to find myself these days. There has always been a social consciousness running through pieces of mine. My father had influenced me because in the art of his time, artists of the "ashcan" movement in art did just that. They recorded what was happening, and said something about people that went beyond just how they looked. Being a poet, himself, that's what he wrote about. It's only later in his life that his poetry became statements about how a day seemed to him, how the dark of a morning with the sun just coming up "meant" to him. Earlier, though, his work represented a loud spokesman for right and justice, a view of things that were menacing in life. But I lived through the years when abstract art and abstract expressionism pervaded the art scene. In that way we are of different beginnings, with different frames of reference. What did Hans Hoffman have to say? ; What did Jackson Pollack find important?; What was Helen Frankenthaller passionate about?; What was Robert Motherwell or Yves Kline driven to communicate?

I think that in much of my work, especially the acrylics, I straddle both, the abstract qualities of paint, brushstrokes, design, AND the importance of content. I can support the non-objective style in that it relates to music's abstract qualities, but I support expression of a recognizeable subject, in the same way that composers do that in "program music".