I was exposed to abstract art as a kid and I embraced it. It seemed natural to me. Over the years I've been deeply moved by the likes of Tapies, Twombly, Rothko, Diebenkorn, and many others, as well as non-objective art from other cultures. I look at and make abstract art, I'm open to and respond to it. I often explore abstraction in my photography and painting and feel the emotional pull of texture and line and color divorced from representation. But doubt gnaws at me. Often the very same abstract art can feel like a fraud, arbitrary and self-indulgent. Too easy to both make and look at. I'm pulled in both directions.

My father, trained when the NYU architecture school was transitioning from Beaux-Arts to Modern in the late 1930s, was able to depict modern buildings and ancient temple scenes with uncanny accuracy and readability. When he was young he was drawn to abstract art as well, and he created some fine paintings in an Abstract Expressionist style in his forties and early fifties. But the older he got the more he skeptical he became. He found renewed respect for Old Masters, 19th century painting, and some early twentieth century art, like the Ashcan School. Towards the end of his life he thought much of what he saw by contemporary artists was self-indulgent junk. He jokingly referred to it as “scribble scrabble” and "mishmash". While weeding out my library recently I came across a small catalogue of an exhibition my father had stopped into in his early seventies, of large-scale work by Julian Schnabel, an artist I've been very ambivalent about over the years. Laid in to the catalogue was a short note from my father to me: "Dear Larry: This is big Ga-bitch." I had completely forgotten about that note and when I saw it I cracked up out loud and felt a familiar sort of bolt-of-lightning shock of connection to him, something I feel far more often than I would expect.

(Just in case it might be misunderstood, ga-bitch is how my father used to pronounce garbage and when I was a little kid I found it funny and it became a sort of family joke.)