Artists Statement

I want to end up with a painting that I haven’t entirely planned. This method of chance, inspiration, and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a totally predetermined one. Each painting has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitably. And in allowing an unplanned outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature always possesses. Of course, this is also a method of bringing in the unconscious process, as far as possible. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than the things I can think out for myself. What really interests me and has absorbed me for years is the unfolding mystery of what I have created. When the paintings have something that I no longer completely understand, that’s the indicator of a successful painting for me. So long as I can grasp them “theoretically,” it’s boring. It’s like the difference between reading poetry and a text book.

What counts is the seeing. The rest is labor, and that’s easy: the pleasure of the physical act of making counts for a lot in painting for me. Anything can be painted. It’s more difficult to see whether what one is doing is any good or not. That’s the only thing that counts. What’s important is not being able to do a something; it’s seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.

It’s a nightmare for me to have to do the same thing all the time. I’m too restless for that. And I can never imagine taking up an immovable stance on anything. All my different paintings have one consistent foundation: me—my attitude and my intention which may be expressed in different ways but never essentially changes. The variety is superficial. One wears different clothes for different occasions; that has nothing to do with style. I just need a climate in which I can paint what I want.

How can one paint a deer or bear without being labeled “kitsch”? For us living in the Pacific Northwest, in particular, relating to nature as strongly as we do, the deer or bear does of course have a symbolic quality. Everyone can immediately feel some sort of mysterious connection. And personally I find the use of the label “kitsch” as an attack on what are typically universal meanings of expression as unimaginative arrogance.

For most artists in America, it is important that they be stylistically identifiable, as if their style is their brand. To change styles too often has been read as a lack of conviction, but that is all changing now in the twenty-first century. What Love, Murder, Magic shows is that there is a single personal signature in the work, whatever the subject, and whether the work is abstract or representational. It expresses the spirit of an artist who has found a kind of above-the-battle tranquility that comes when one has decided that one can paint anything one wants to in any way one likes without feeling that something is given up.

-Todd Horton, 2007