AN ARTIST STATEMENT: SUMMER 2019

With the works exhibited in the show Marc Shanker: Summer 2019 Paintings, I wanted to challenge the idea, “the mind craves a logical sequence.” With this intention, I decided to make paintings that had no obvious story. To do so, I needed to subvert my strong disposition to construct a narrative while working. I began the series by looking through hundreds of old drawings, some made twenty or more years ago. I was in search of provocative imagery that made little narrative sense. I took bits and pieces of old drawings and, on the basis of their  compositional qualities, juxtaposed them together to create an expressive composition. In spite of myself, as I painted I began to construct stories that interconnected the disparate images and colors. I made a conscious effort to keep the narrative qualities secondary. I didn’t want to know what the paintings were about. Instead, I concentrated on composition. The colors emerged, receded, and re-emerged. They called their own tune. As I look at the images today, I can, with some effort and imagination, make  some sense of them. But I don’t really know what stories they tell. I realize that the stories I find in the paintings today may not be what I was thinking at the time I painted them. If that information ever consciously existed, it has certainly disappeared, as today’s narrative will also disappear eventually. All that will remain is the painting itself.