Artist Statement
I am a painter. I work out of an unheated studio above the harbor in Provincetown, and I have spent the last several years painting the same winter over and over. The studio is cold enough that the work cannot be faked. Either the canvas carries what I can carry up the stairs, or it does not. That condition is the basis of everything that follows.
For a long time I made work that was about the walls. The walls that tell you which paintings count and which do not. The walls that divide one discipline from another, one medium from another, one generation from another. The walls that convince a young artist they must earn permission before they are allowed to take their own work seriously. I painted them anyway, and the canvases began to climb.
Ladders, not walls, is not a slogan I picked up later. It is the position the work itself has been stating since the first canvas. The studio wall the painting leans against at the end of the day is the wall. The painting is the ladder. Every canvas I finish is one more rung laid against a wall that has been there longer than I have, and the next painting picks up where the last one stopped.
The position extends outward from the studio. The same wall surrounds the profession of the artist as a whole. One painter's ladder has never been enough to bring that wall down, and it cannot be the only answer for the artists who come after me. I founded the Ministry of Art to take the position the work has been stating privately and turn it into an institution any artist can climb. Ladders-over-walls is the test every instrument, every initiative, and every act of the Ministry must pass.
What that means in practice is concrete. Housing for working artists is a ladder. Studios, darkrooms, rehearsal rooms, printing presses, and kitchens are ladders. Mentorship that travels downward as freely as it travels upward is a ladder. Public recognition through trust rather than through purchasing power is a ladder. Standards applied equally, without exception, are a ladder. Membership in the profession that is conferred, not sold, is a ladder.
I am aware that this sounds naive from the outside, and it can read as idealism from the inside. It is not either. It is the only coherent answer I have found to the question of what a painter should do with a wall he cannot move. The choice has always been to climb it, slowly, with each canvas leaving the path steeper and more open than I found it. The Ministry exists so that the next painter does not have to climb the same wall alone, or invent the same answer from scratch, or be told by anyone that the wall belongs to them.
The work is one ladder. The institution is a second. Together they are the answer I can give to the profession that has carried me. If you are reading this and you are an artist, the page is meant as an invitation to climb together. If you are not an artist, the page is meant as an answer to the question of what the work, and the Ministry, are for.
The work is the ladder. The studio is the wall it leans against.