When I’m making work my disposition toward my practice is constantly changing, as I’ve often noted — what makes sense one day doesn’t the next; captivating ideas quickly become dead ends, only to become captivating again. Because of this flux, every day and every time can feel charged, significant for some reason or another. This is all to frame the following statements, which feel significant enough that I’m tempted to call this moment in my studio space-time continuum a ‘key frame.’ Not just a turn in the road, but a rest stop at which I’ve got to check the map.

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I’ve made a few paintings in the past couple of months that use playgrounds as direct visual references. In my studio visits and critiques I’ve talked a lot about what interests me about them, which ends up being a complex hybrid of “what they look like” and “what they mean.” When you use images as a painter, it’s a damn good idea to think about both of these things; if you focus on the former and neglect the latter, you’re denying yourself and any audience the depth of purposefully constructed perception. If you focus only on the latter, well, you’re creating the same denial. Funny how that works.

Sometimes when people who aren’t painters ask me what kind of paintings I make, or what my paintings look like, I haphazardly tell them I’m a “suburban landscape painter.” This answer is more coy than true, and I’m dissatisfied each time I say it. That’s another problem entirely, but the reason I bring it up is that isn’t a random reflex: I do look toward the suburban environment as a site which I can mine for meaning. I’m so wrapped up in the cultural dynamics of suburbia that every element seems to carry meaning for me. We’re all like that, I think, when we’re in our most intimate environments. Anything is everything, for us there, every shard carries the whole window.

In my thinking I’ve abstracted what I consider to be “suburban” as a cultural paradigm, I’ve blown the idea open, lifted it off the ground so that I can see it elsewhere as well. The suburban ideal, and the suburban problem, are profoundly American in scope. They are here in the cities too.

This is how I’ve come to fixate on the Playground as an elemental site, a containing site, one place that holds so many tiered meanings for me. We have playgrounds every few blocks in Chicago, and there is nothing particularly suburban about the history of playgrounds nor their contemporary manifestation. However, the playground is a kind of doppleganger suburb. If we take Lewis Mumford at face value when he comments that suburban culture is “based on a childish view of the world,” then we can run with the metonym. I’ve become interested in which types of experiences are privileged by playgrounds, what types of meanings adults assign to various activities and how they implement them. This implementation — the construction of the playground — is based on a conflation of a science and a myth. The science is the study of cognitive and physical development which dictates what types of activities are useful in the growth of healthy children. The myth is the overlaying of cultural aspirations and values — childish abstractions of meaning — onto the more scientific principles governing structure and function.

This analysis also leads to a more wide-eyed acknowledgment that playgrounds are one of the most beautifully surreal structures to ever emerge from the gridded minds of humans. The scientific principles of their development — the child psychology driving their form — is a sober and rational rebuttal to this; the curvilinear shapes, bright colors, strange mutations of shapes are all supported by evidence-driven theories. But all one needs to do to is head to the nearest simple playground to expose this lie. For most, if not all, of those shape/surface/color decisions are flirting with cultural structure, infused with dreams of adults, not children. If the suburb is based on a childish view, than the playground is, in a similar way, based on the adult view. And so is it not the most big-hearted, beautiful thing, that we make these miniature landscapes for our children in which we turn our roofs into goofy, bulbous canopies, where we strip our walls of their surfaces, leaving just the framing and supports, where we give them options of walking, climbing, swinging, or sliding their way around? Playgrounds could be pushed into much more rigid territory. I choose to see the fact that they remain opened and abstracted half-places as proof of our own uncertainties about our adult world, and perhaps even a hopeful obeisance to the child’s unknowing, her/his potential to unravel and reconstruct.

The word “choose” is probably the operative one in that last sentence, and that leads me back to my initial reason for writing tonight: I’ve been very aware, as I develop these thoughts-as-paintings, of the role choice plays in my “reading” of the playground site. I choose to interpret in this way. Returning to my earlier dichotomy: I am considering the possibility that the visual quality of a playground may not inherently serve the meaning I am interested in.

I’m not sure that this is a problem, but it’s a consideration. It’s a consideration in terms of whether the playground, as a site, will play more of an overt visual role in the next body of work, or whether it will serve as a conceptual backbone. Maybe I’ve found a kind of mantra image, a visual that I need to return to in order to replenish and clarify my process. Maybe maybe maybe.