Eckhoff On Painting

Earlier this year, Carl Eckhoff described his work as a painter. A reprint of this personal statement follows.

"My work as a painter is process oriented, based on the modernist ethic that seeing as one is painting - the purity of the act, so to speak - is more honest than a pre-assumed idea of the picture structure. On the piece Styrofoam Lovers with emotions of concrete unfolding the universe like a white tablecloth, I started on a six by seven foot ground with only one color allowing myself to arrive at the edges; rendering form specifically and automatically allowing form an unconscious flow.

The work starts out with no predetermined images. This process creates work that prevents us from treating it as an object of knowledge, but instead it compels us to recognize in others and in ourselves a complexity of motive, psychic flux, and an inner disorganization. But this is half of the story - it is the impossibility of living entirely in the moment without the tug of memory. The memory of images - taken from autobiographical experiences along with popular cultural imagery - gives the viewer a worthwhile experience intenally and for the most part unknowingly has the viewer translating images and combinations of images into ideas whose words we may not know we are hearing, but that have their profound influence nevertheless."