Stephen Bram
Paint­ings

The var­i­ous kinds of work I cre­ate are part of the same thing; they all refer to a spe­cif­ic spa­tial sit­u­a­tion, but in dif­fer­ent con­texts. In this sense, I’m not com­mit­ted to paint­ing – I feel like what I’m doing isn’t even paint­ing any­more. Per­haps I con­tin­ue to make paint­ings on can­vas because the medi­um of paint­ing is stan­dard and giv­en and because paint­ing is a rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple, one per­son task. Paint­ing also pro­vides the per­fect space for an abstract con­sid­er­a­tion of ideas.

Most impor­tant­ly, though, the com­po­si­tion of the work, its iden­ti­ty as a paint­ing and its resem­blance to any­thing else (to archi­tec­ture, for exam­ple) are sec­ondary to its rela­tion­ship to the two or three dimen­sion­less, imma­te­r­i­al points that I refer to as ​‘van­ish­ing points’. The pri­ma­ry sig­nif­i­cance of this rela­tion­ship – whichev­er medi­um I am work­ing in – can’t be stressed enough.

Stephen Bram in con­ver­sa­tion with Sue Cramer, Novem­ber 2002