Gary Carter-Coffman

I came to this body of work later in life, but not late to curiosity.

The paintings gathered here were made during a period of sustained experimentation, much of it between the ages of 60 and 70. I wasn’t interested in illustrating a particular subject or arriving at a predetermined style. I was interested in discovering what could happen when color, geometry, gesture, texture, and accident were allowed to occupy the same space.

My paintings begin with structure, but they rarely remain obedient to it.

Lines establish boundaries. Color challenges them. Forms overlap, interrupt, conceal and reappear. Acrylic, oil pastel, pen and other materials leave different kinds of evidence behind. Some marks are deliberate; others are discovered in the process of making. I don’t try to eliminate those contradictions. They are part of the work.

I think of each painting as an investigation rather than an answer.

There is a recurring tension in these works between order and disruption, containment and release, clarity and ambiguity. I am interested in the point where one thing becomes another—where a boundary becomes an opening, where a shape suggests an object without becoming one, where an accidental mark becomes necessary.

The paintings are abstract, but they are not intended to be empty of meaning. They are records of attention: accumulations of decisions, revisions, impulses and discoveries. They are less concerned with telling the viewer what to see than with creating a space in which something can be seen.

I have come to believe that a painting does not have to resolve its contradictions.

Perhaps it is enough for it to hold them.

At this stage of my life, that is what interests me most: continuing to look, continuing to make, and remaining open to what I don’t yet know.

Gary Carter-Coffman

Palm Springs/Cathedral City, California