Paul Manes
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“I like to work big. Maybe it’s because I’m from Texas. I focus on the act of painting, the tubes of paint, brushes, palettes, turpentine—I paint only in oil palette knives, going to work every day, a constant obsession with imagery: It all adds up to one whole. Information comes from any quarter and from any person, place, or thing, and is interpreted through a single ever-growing, ever-changing net.
I think about cave paintings, Goya, Bosch, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Burri, Pollock, Johns, Rauschenberg, Cézanne, Cubism, Realism, Surrealism, Romanticism, El Greco, birds, trees, dreams—did I mention Goya? My relatives came to the United States from farms in Sweden, Wales and Ireland. My father’s family were blacksmiths in Missouri way back from before what they called the “unCIVIL WAR”. Maybe that’s why I would probably rather have a hand on a plow than a finger on a computer button. I started to paint late. I didn’t get out of Texas and move to New York until I was thirty-five. Then, I spent my life in the Frick Collection, then, in The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney, the Metropolitan and Guggenheim museums, and the constant hustle and bustle and artworld intrigues. I read poetry of Rilke, Yates, Blake and Wallace Stevens, which inspired me. Then I got lucky and one year I was able to go to all the performances at The Metropolitan Opera, though in my loft in Williamsburg, I played country music on my guitar. Landscape sometimes inspires my paintings. I left New York for Carbondale, Colorado, where I can look at the mountains instead of skyscrapers and asphalt.”
Paul Manes was born May 4, 1948 in Austin, Texas. He began his professional career in New York City in the early 1980s. His art has been widely exhibited in America and Europe and his paintings have been acquired by many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and the Hyde Collection Art Museum. His work forms part of numerous private collections in the United States and Europe.
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