WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO SURREALISM?
DO YOU ADMIRE THE SURREALIST PAINTERS?

Pararealism might be a better description than surrealism for my oil paintings, "para" meaning "alongside" rather than the "over," "beyond," or "above" that "sur" implies. The situations depicted are usually somewhat unlikely but not necessarily impossible.

The mixed media, gouache, collage, and construction pieces are another matter. I can jump the fence to complete impossibility because it's an entirely different process in my mind. I suppose you can call the mixed-media pieces surrealist, but I'm not sure I'd like it much because the surrealists proper pretty much irritate me with their silly manifestos and proclamations and the whole boy's club thing. Of course there's always the possibility that they meant the manifestos to be silly and it was only those who wrote about them later that didn't get the joke. I don't know.

The artist associated with the surrealists whose work I feel closest to is Joseph Cornell. I don't know if he considered himself a surrealist or not, but I think his work is different from the others in that most of the card-carrying surrealists made it a point to juxtapose disparate elements. The notes from their work would seem to provide the "clang!" of objects colliding. On the other hand, Cornell chose objects that he saw as fitting together even if the way they fit was mysterious, and the notes they sound are the "thunk" of objects connecting. I think my work sounds more like "thunk" than "clang!"