Stephen Canino

I have finally made it back into the studio after my summer hiatus. It feels great to be painting again. The Hunter MFA building on west 41st street is oppressively hot for most of the summer, but it has become more manageable. So, I have jumped right back into what I am calling “Big Painting” for now for the lack of a better title. It may take the tile of “Pancake Hollow” after its drawing counterpart. I have been thinking of this idea the “natural” and the “synthetic.” Both terms in many ways can be interchangeable with each other, but at a basic level what is tangible. What happens to a memory as I intend to translate it into a painting? What do we embellish? What do we romanticize? To a certain degree, the memory loses its validity. It becomes malleable and fluid. On what level does the memory cease to resemble the original experience? I guess this isn’t just about memory, but about viewing our ordinary experiences in a similar light. How we feel about our patterns and routines. (I haven’t quite figured any of this out and for some of you reading this you may think this is complete bullshit. But, please feel free to call me on it. It will probably clarify things.) So, yeah, memory, ordinary experience, vice versa or both memory and the ordinary simultaneously are my raw materials, so to speak. These are taken from me, the notion of the personal, and brought into a public context with an audience. Now, in the end I wouldn’t say that this work is personal, but only that it is important that it started there. Through the act of painting, the act of breaking down or dissecting, I come up with many layers of meaning. Now it seems that I am getting dangerously close to the post-modern when I am talking about layering and fracturing and so fourth, but this is not a leveling of meaning, or an emptying of meaning. It is about building a world out of a number of different languages and energies. I think I’ll stop here for the moment, but please feel free to leave any comments.