Presentation of Work at the University of Washington

Speaking to the University of Washington MFA Painting graduate students on Friday.

I'll be presenting my own work, and thinking about the contemporary intellectual role of painting: a living digestions of 70,000 years of visual symbolism and expression, sophisticated sensory engagment - the feedback loop of hand to eye to mind - with the phenomenology of material and illusion; careful observation and direct tracing - rather than technologically negotiatied- of the external and internal visual forms of experience, the uncovering of specifc social, cultural, intellectual and even spirtual realities, presaging and still engaging sciences, but always idosyncratic in origin, still communicatable, all of which are usually inaccessible to other processes.

Painting skills - especially and above all direct observation- enhance this process, and like science, the methodology, the grammar of your question, is crucial.

Many good artists think as painters but without paint, and lots of people certainly paint without thinking. But it is driving, ambitious inquiry that characterizes advanced art making, the kind of art that changes what human beings are capable of thinking. Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Van Gogh - they changed and explanded what we can know.

 - Jamie Bollenbach

JamieBollenbach.com.