Dan Treado

Robert Ryman's comment about the nature of painting in the latter half of the twentieth century has always stuck with me: "It's not a question of what to paint, but rather, how to paint it." My paintings are process works that borrow subject matter from sources such as film and photography, physics, biology, x-ray and electron microscope images, and most recently, illustrations from anatomy books. The organic forms I tend to employ are fluid but restrained, and part of their function is to articulate the space that surrounds the form; paint is called to substitute for flesh, for air, for dust particles floating in cinematic light.

The titles to the paintings are significant in that they add a third or fourth layer to the paintings -- they're often comical, the way nature can appear to be, and in my mind, they describe the shortest one-act plays one could imagine. Often they rely on language that is usually very specific to a particular discipline, such as names for race horses, or pop music song lyrics, or punch lines to old jokes; I think it fascinating, and useful, that these tropes follow the same set of rules involving random mutation and adaption that drives the life cycle of species.