If I make a hundred paintings using a set process and an expected outcome, I’ve made myself an agent of nature. It’s just like passively making footprints in mud or letting falling rain leave a texture in sand, or letting a running stream erode a strip of countryside, only it happens slower or faster, depending on which, via the service of human agency. The human here behaves as a part of nature. The outcome is more about nature than it is about culture, unless culture has deliberately been aligned with nature; in which case culture is effaced, transparent, and nature is at the forefront.

A hundred paintings from a set process directed toward an expected outcome are inconsequential individually, although the collected one hundred paintings may be consequential, even though they may represent more nature than culture.

Many artists make paintings that are inconsequential by design, whether they realize it or not. Many paintings in Modernism are inconsequential, but those tend not to be celebrated. They tend to be tucked away. Modernist artists often made inconsequential art on the way to making consequential art.

To give in to a process of inconsequentiality seems absurd, yet most artists seem to do this, if Instagram is any indication. To release a painting without being able to substantially answer the question “Why” – presuming the painting itself doesn’t answer that question – seems a mistake.

In my work I aim for paintings that are consequential, and I am willing to release paintings that are not inconsequential. I resist processes aimed at inconsequentiality through rote repetition of ideas methods techniques colors subjects, through diminutive scale ambition interest and so on, through betrayal of artist indifference disinterest ambivalence.

If this functions for you as an artist statement, feel free to use it.