Heart Play

" Lasker No, it's just that it's useful in the sense that it creates a threshhold into something pictorial. If you use an abstract image to talk about the notion of making a picture, then you think more about how you make a picture than about the picture itself. It's a way of protecting yourself against fully engaging the narrative of an image. Creating a narrative which is more analytical than it is fictional."

"Herzog In what sense?"

"Lasker I think that abstraction prevents you from fully entering a fiction. A picture is a fiction. Abstraction keeps you away from that fiction and gives you a means of approaching a narrative in an analytical manner."

(a place to work, nothing fancy: Excerpt from an interview by Hans Michael Herzog with Jonathan Lasker from Jonathan Lasker Gemälde | Paintings 1977-1997)

"Certainly the shapes in these early paintings seem like actors. Actors with fragmented bodies; lost wraiths. Such theatrical metaphors are inherent in American painting: Rothko wrote in 1947, ìI think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame."(Sperone Westwater: Jonathan Lasker: the dialectics of touch )

:: note :: . . . remarkable following chris ashley in a place to work, nothing fancy . . . the work . . . the daily studious practical and articulated research . . . the body of work is much appreciated . . .

"but the origins of the work are really based in recording memory, story, place, nature, color and space, the need to have a regular art practice during a time when a studio practice is difficult to maintain, my interest (commitment? belief? desire?) in abstract painting (a kind of romantic minimalism, I guess). I've learned over three year's time the potential of the weblog as a personal work space, a time-based portfolio, that is a place of production, exhibition, and archiving, being both an individual space and a node on a network(s)."(email to Tom: August 26, 2003)