Lately I’ve been thinking about the space in between paintings. By that I mean I’ve been thinking about the work I’m making now compared to work I made last year, and then to work I made 20 and 30 years ago. I’ve always thought that the really crucial aspect of making art was the brush-in-hand part, the physical engagement; the struggle to make the thing. Now I’m wondering about what happens in between all of that making and what all the editing and redirecting amounts to. Who I am as an artist depends at least as much on how I manage the space in between as much as the paintings themselves. Another way of saying this is that who I am as an artist is revealed by how I change my mind-how I decide not to do one thing or another-as much as what I actually make.

Since I’ve painted the same subject for 30 years the ways in which I’ve changed my mind are often pretty subtle. Despite that subtlety those moves have created enormous changes over time. An intense familiarity with my subject has allowed me to become truly intimate with it so that very small adjustments mean a great deal. Every single aspect of what I do now in the studio is crucial. The scale of a painting, for instance, is hugely important. A smaller painting becomes an object, an icon or a relic. Larger paintings become expansive and reference landscape. Large is a different desire, a different yearning from small.

There are so many more factors other than scale; red is a different state of mind, a different taste and feel from yellow. A long horizontal creates an entirely different rhythm from a square. Oil paint on panel is something different-means something different-from watercolor on paper. A brush mark is a world apart from one made with a roller or a knife.

I know each of these differences intimately so that when I decide in between paintings that it should be yellow and not blue then I’ve steered myself in a way that is, really, the work itself. Over a long period of time I have found that these decisions were making the work less anecdotal-less and less about balls really-and more of a way to satisfy some longing for form in general. Apparently it wasn’t a ball I was interested in as much as an experience of roundness itself, or emptiness, or black. The work has become sparer over time-leaner-and more essential.

Often times those changes occurred after a great deal of planning and thinking. I studied, for instance, Joseph Albers or Agnes Martin and decided that the yellow should wobble…or that there should be much more white. Other times change occurred less consciously. Sometimes after years of making paintings of single balls you walk into the studio and see multiples everywhere; piles and pairs and rows and you say: “Oh! So this is what I have become…damn…I didn’t even know”.

And then you start again from there.