Artist's statement

"To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees."

— Paul Valéry
"Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of the skin and cartilage, can be the third language that animates where the tongue falters."
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“...for me Jimmy [Schuyler] is the Vuillard of us, he withholds his secret, the secret thing until the moment appears to reveal it. We wait and wait for the name of a flower while we praise the careful cultivation. We wait for someone to speak, And it is Jimmy in an aside."
— Barbara Guest, refers to James Schuyler as an "intimist" in writing an appreciation about the poet James Schuyler, Denver Quarterly, spring 1990

Process and path | drawing and painting

The guiding intention is closeness. Closeness in looking and closeness as empathy. Often it will be a feeling of affinity that initiates a drawing or painting and propels the work forward. I want to find my way deeper into the nature of someone, something, a feeling, or emotional state. Drawing and painting are my ways to burrow in. Closeness arrives through the process. Through the action of seeing and responding with mark-making, I uncover an intimacy, one that had not previously existed, with a person, a detail from life, an object, or an experience. When fully absorbed in close looking and image making, I sense form and formlessness, like joy and despair, are not opposites but partners in a conversation that is private and vulnerable. Loss and discovery engage an empty space and become personally intense. In the end, I hope that this reach for affinity, and the path to find intimacy, is shared in experiencing the work..
— Timothy Blackburn