The transdisciplinary artist and thinker Michael Garfield proffers we are living in the glass age: through all of our digital devices, along with the windows surfacing every modern building and mode of transportation, we are persistently and ever more increasingly experiencing the world through glass.  

All of these images are made through glass, on an iPad.  Prior to making these, everything I drew and painted was contingent upon a tactile experience with materials: a pencil scratching across paper, paint mushing and pushing through absorbent surfaces.  Working through glass is a disconcerting, disorienting experience.  Many fascinating effects can be had by this wondrous technology: amazing facsimiles of “paint” mixing in real time, watercolors and oils “seeping” into the faux surface with different speeds, viscosities, and flow. And yet everything feels exactly the same: always a plastic pen sliding across a glass surface.  No matter how much I want the digital experience to replace the analog one, it just doesn’t work.  Analog reality is too sticky, too vital, too necessary for survival.

These images are what result from this fraught encounter with glass.  Admittedly, everything is too easy.  I don’t have to set up all those materials, I can quickly apply a hundred different kinds of media to a dozen different kinds of surfaces and never have to contend with the stubborn ways materials do and don’t work with one another.  It’s as easy as a plastic pen gliding across a glass surface: no friction, no grappling, no waiting for the thing to dry: no random, stubborn, frustrating encounters with how the world works. 

So what’s to celebrate in these images if this is my disposition and my experience. They represent a new kind of encounter with the world, one on a par with all the other ways my life is mediated by glass. Making these images is that much more like driving to work, writing emails, and watching tv. I’m used to making art that works outside of and away from those experiences, in order to tap into and savor a more richly haptic experience with the world.  But living through glass is also our world experience, and perhaps there’s some value in at least seeing and feeling and thinking through what happens when I make art with it rather than against it.