Chuck D. Image Quotations

We were all figuring out ways to build an image rather than paint it. Sculptors didn't want to work in bronze or marble or wax. They wanted to find a material that didn't have any art use. We were similarly trying to find ways of working that were not about paint-it-in, paint-it-out, scrape-it-off -- some way of working all over at once.

It's the tension between the marks on a flat surface, and then the image built, that interested me. And I was always a dyed-in-the-wool formalist anyway. I think process sets you free, because you know you don't have good days or bad days. You just show up. You don't wait for inspiration.

In between those early ones and what I'm doing now, there were all kinds of pieces in which I tried to build works incrementally and let the increments show, so I sprayed dots or I used my finger prints or used chunks of pulp paper, or any one of a number of ways to build an image out of discrete individual units.