Artist Statement
I started painting shortly after I graduated from medical school. When I was a medical student, most of my friends were musicians, artists and actors. I envied them, the creative outlet that was their career. Medical school was a lot of things--rewarding and challenging, to be sure--but one thing it was not was creative. I guess that is one of the many reasons I was drawn to psychiatry. It was the one subspecialty in medicine that afforded, if not encouraged, creative thinking.
In my mid twenties I made regular trips to New York City, and my early visits to MOMA truly blew my mind. I was in love with the notion of modernism at the time. I was crazy about jazz, 20th century literature, existentialism and art house cinema. Seeing the modern masterpieces at MOMA burned a permanent imprint on my brain.
I have always been drawn to abstraction more than realism, even with photography. Like many young abstract painters, I had to fight through an obsession with Picasso. I loved his figurative work--the El Greco elongated figures of his Blue Period, as well as his primitive and cubist images inspired by African art. I am also a big fan of the figurative paintings of Matisse, Modigliani and Max Beckmann.
In recent years, I have been painting more and more pure abstractions. I have never lost my passion for the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. Many of my works readily reflect their influence. I am particularly fond of de Kooning, and I was fortunate to see his most recent retrospective in Manhattan.
When I first started painting in this vein, I had just started my residency in psychiatry. I was fascinated with all the connections between Freud and Jung and the abstract expressionists. It seemed to me that the painters talked as much about primary process and archetypal imagery as did the psychoanalysts. These ideas have stuck with me to this day. I love getting lost in a painting, utilizing areas of my brain that I suppose are shut off in normal everyday existence. My guess is that it is akin to what people who meditate feel, or what runs through the mind of a child laying on the floor, scribbling with a box of crayons.
People often ask me about the meaning of an abstract painting, or, more frequently, what I was feeling when I painted it. They are also interested in what type of feeling I was trying to evoke in the viewer. I never have anything clever to say in reply to these questions. For me, abstract art is almost always about the elusive, trying to give some kind of visual representation to things that are inherently unseen, things that are out of our reach. Good abstractions may or may not possess compositional balance, bright or muted colors, graceful lines or primitive markings. They may evoke serenity or wild energy. They may be thought provoking or emotionally stirring or both. But I think the one thing they almost always possess is originality, the invention of something purely visual, that has no other inherent purpose but is somehow captivating or moving.
As a painter, this is thrilling--to create a work of art.
Thomas Lavie
