Car j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,
De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:
Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles!

— Charles Baudelaire

For I have, to enchant those submissive lovers,
Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful:
My eyes, my large, wide eyes of eternal brightness!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

     The “clarifying and concentrating of material experience” as John Dewey describes in Art as Experience, “a work of art does not lead to another experience of the world; it is an experience” The experience that interests me is phenomenological.

I make paintings that are about the experience of their specific qualities and not affirmations of the idea of art outside of themselves.

Each painting is its own place.

Each painting has its own light.

Each painting is its own character.

Each painting is a sensation.

Each painting is an experience.

“Solidification of the light, of the wind”

“Touch the foundations of the world”

                                      —Denis Coutagne on Cezanne from an interview by Judith Benhamou