Visiting some galleries in downtown Dallas recently I was discouraged and bored by much of I what saw; the more rigorously I looked at the work, the less it held up. I almost felt it didn’t want to be deeply stared at, consumed, but rather just lightly grazed over. If I visit 100 galleries, there will be 4-5 shows of mild interest and 1-2 that I find somewhat more engaging. Perhaps this engagement/boredom ratio is not exceptional. I do feel I bring very, very high expectations to the work I view. I was trained in the 1980’s as an observational painter within a very rigorous tradition, connected to places like the New York Studio School, Queens College, Indiana University Bloomington, Yale, Kansas City Art Institute, American University, Bowery Gallery. Some of the artists who had a direct influence on me included: Norman Turner, Rosemary Beck, Wilbur Niewald, Bernard Chaet, Gabriel Laderman, Stanley Lewis, Martha Armstrong, Debra Kahn, Marjorie Portnow, Barbara Grossman and of course Neil Welliver who ran Penn’s MFA program. What connected all these painters was their seriousness of purpose and deep consideration of the history of painting and the formal properties and challenges of constructing a (contemporary) painting. These were not formalists, academicians (though many taught) or traditionalists. Their eyes were wide open with regard to contemporary art theory and the more general post-modern ethos of the time. First and foremost, these artists were highly trained observers. So much of my formal education involved learning to see, deeply and analytically. Drawing and painting from observation were not simply empirical acts of recording visual data, organized on a rectangle (though it was that as well,) they were acts of questioning and deeply considering, of looking with dispassionate rigor and responding in a highly determined, often passionate way. I think it’s fair to equate some marks made by these artists to precise cuts made by a world-class surgeon–grounded in rich evolving technique and theory and informed by historical precedent. Very little of this type of training exists today. Conceptual, performative and other theory based frameworks underpin much contemporary art education. I will not judge the value of these approaches. Rather it is the loss of rigorous visual training, coupled to analytical constructive concerns that I deeply miss, especially as it relates to the great majority of the work being made and shown in contemporary galleries.