No Time To Evolve

Archived Series, 2015 to 2019

No Time to Evolve came directly out of the Mad World drawings. After years working in graphite, I wanted to paint again. The problem was that the drawings could not be painted. The density I had built by hand, thousands of interlocking parts accumulated line by line, was impossible to carry into oil. So the work had to find another way to hold the same charge. What paint offered was not accumulation but flow. The intricate drawn structure dissolved into mass, into melting, merging, biomorphic form. Coral, fur, feather, growth, and creature collapse into one another without hierarchy, suspended in states of excess and mutation. The condition I had named in the drawings is still here, things forming and decaying at once, but now it is carried by saturation and dissolution rather than by line. Nature overtakes the frame, in part because paint itself wants to flow and merge, and the built precision of the drawings gave way to organic overflow. Within the longer practice, this series is the discovery that painted condition wants to dissolve rather than build. That discovery is what eventually made the quiet later work possible. Here the dissolution is total and overwhelming. Later it would be subtracted down until only the held remainder was left. No Time to Evolve is the flood before the stillness.