I will begin with dimensions. As one should. I had a mathematician friend tell me once, perhaps twice, that dimension is concerned with the constituent structure of all space and its relation to time. I did not understand this statement and still I do not, in spite of its undeniable, obvious poetic charm. He also tried to tell me that the dimensions of an object are independent of the space in which that object is embedded. It’s not clear to me that even he understood what he was saying, though he seemed quite taken with the idea. What I do understand is that my canvas is twelve feet high and twenty-one feet and three inches across. I cannot explain the three inches, but can say that they are crucial to the work. It is nailed to a wall that is twenty feet tall and thirty-five feet across. The opposite wall is the same and the adjacent walls are but fifteen feet wide. And so the square footage of the space is five hundred twenty-five. The volume of the building space is ten thousand five hundred cubic feet. I am six feet tall and weigh one hundred and ninety-two pounds. I cannot explain the two pounds. I prefer that numbers be written out as words. I also favor referring to colors by name rather than by sample. I do not like charts depicting gradations of colors or hues. At the paint store or art shop there are thousands of such strips, just waiting to be thrown away. They tell me nothing. The examples, and they are never exemplars or nonpareils, are but mere approximations of what the paint will be on the pallet or on the canvas or the paper or the wood or my fingertips. Transparent yellow is not transparent on the swatch. What a word that is. Swatch. Indian yellow might as well be cadmium orange. Aureolin might as well be nickel titanate might as well be lemon yellow. Names, on the other hand, are precise, unambiguous; one might even say rigid, fixed, unalterable, certainly inelastic. That is not to say that words are not precise, but names in fact are. Even when they are wrong or offered in error. A name is never wide of the mark. I should point out that I view color names as proper names, in that they give us no information about the things named but identify those things specifically. Just as my name works for me, my name being Kevin Pace. There are probably other Kevin Paces in the world, but our names are not the same. Perhaps our names have the same name, but the name of my name is not a proper name.
These are my paints, my colors. Powders mixed with linseed oil. This is my painting, colors on raw linen. I have used much phthalo blue, Prussian mixed with indigo. In the upper right hand corner is cerulean blending into cobalt, maybe bleeding into cobalt. The colors and their names are everywhere, on everything. The colors all mean something, though I cannot say what, would not say if I could. Their names are more descriptive than their presence, as their presence need not and does not describe anything. This is my painting. It lives in this structure that looks like a foaling barn; I suppose that it is. No one enters but me. Not my wife. Not my children. Not my best friend Richard.
There is another building in which I make other paintings. Everyone is welcome there. The paintings are available and uncovered and waiting to be considered, bought, and hung on living room walls or in bank lobbies. I like them well enough. Some are good. Some not so. It’s really not up to me to judge and so I won’t. They are all whores, these paintings. I acknowledge them, appreciate them as just that.