Naïve and Sentimental Painting
The name for this related group of paintings is a reference to an essay by the German playwright, poet, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795). Schiller identified two fundamental creative impulses:­ the spontaneous and unfiltered, or naïve, and the self-conscious and reflective, or sentimental (in his terms “sentiment” was akin to “realist” and was associated with the loss of the naïve). To approach birds, flowers, butterflies, snails, etc., from a naïve standpoint, as though blind to the mawkishness associated with such subject matter, is impossible and immediately rouses equal and opposite impulses towards analytical reserve. These paintings, then, are in part an expression of my very personal and unfiltered relationship to the natural world, and a rumination on human involvement in it.