After Postmodernism: My Painting Ethos

I came to painting late, after a lifetime spent revering and studying it. I have lived with Impressionism, Post‑Impressionism, and Modernism in museums, auction houses, and private collections, long before I ever picked up a brush. When my wife finally put one in my hand, I had to decide not only what to paint, but how and why— I was given a paintbrush  and  a challenge, and I then began a journey, upon which I had to consider what style of art I would pursue.

As a former philosophy student, my first instinct was to ask questions. What elevates a work of art to be called beautiful, or a classic, or even truly valuable? Where do we find value in art at all? Some see value that lies in beauty; some in inspiration; some in rarity or price; some simply in the satisfaction of possession. But collectibles—baseball cards, Magic cards—can be valuable without being art. I became interested in a different kind of value: the kind that arises when a work feels necessary, when it seems to justify the care that made it.

To think this through, I returned to theory as well as to the paintings I loved. I revisited modern and contemporary debates about what art is for, and I found myself gradually clarifying an ethos built around three linked ideas: “craftsmanship”, “composition”, and “sublimity”—or what I call “majesty”.

I paint under the long shadow of postmodern art, with its embedded irony and skepticism about any single truth or canon. I accept some of its insights; I know I am not painting in 1880, and I don’t pretend to. Postmodernism has been valuable in exposing how “truths” and standards are constructed, and in widening the field of what can count as art. But as I watched its effects over time, I saw a pattern that did not sit well with me: a preference for deconstruction over construction, for quotation over commitment, and for irony over belief.

In fine art, postmodernism often means skepticism, pluralism, and a kind of stylistic free‑for‑all. It distrusts universal claims, sees truths as contingent, and tends to favor parody or critique over affirmation. Styles are freely mixed and recycled to show how arbitrary stylistic authority can be. At its best, this can be sharp and liberating. Taken too far, it risks leaving us with cleverness instead of conviction, and with works that are more about attitude than about presence.

Alongside this runs a broader 20th‑century notion of Relativism: the idea that judgments of beauty or value are nothing but taste or context. Philosophically, that view has bite; culturally, it eroded shared standards and made it harder to speak about excellence without apology. In art, it licensed a kind of anything‑goes pluralism in which many styles coexist, but no one can say why something might be better than something else except in sociological terms. At the limit, the work risks losing its relevance and, more importantly, its humanity. The Brillo Box was an astonishing idea, but it carried very little spiritual presence.

By the end of the 20th century, even some of postmodernism’s greatest beneficiaries were worried about where this led. To paraphrase David Foster Wallace, postmodern irony—initially a tool for exposing clichés and empty rhetoric—had become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication rather than a step toward anything deeper. In philosophy, politics, and theology, anti‑relativist reactions began to push back, concerned that unchecked relativism produces cynicism or indifference. In the art world, this underlies much of the talk about “after postmodernism” and the neomodern move back toward seriousness, truth, and spiritual presence.

An early warning comes from within modernism itself. The Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz described a crisis around the mid‑1910s, when he felt he had pushed abstraction “too far in the direction of abstract art,” losing the humanity of the subject. He did not have the language of postmodernism, but his worry is the same: that formal innovation can drift away from the human core that gave it urgency. In response, he shifted his work back toward more legible, expressive figures while keeping much of Cubism’s structure—a first attempt at restoring balance between abstraction and humanity.

That balance is where I want to stand. I think of my position as neomodern or “after postmodern”: I accept the critiques of the last century, but I do not want to remain forever in critique. I want painting to be able to aim again at beauty, depth, and even spiritual presence without naïveté. In practice, that means recovering the ideas of intention and value. For some postmodern theorists, intention is a problem—better to let the work simply “be” and to refuse any claim about what it means or wants. For me, without intention there is no humanity. An artwork that has no intention beyond displaying its own contingency may be smart, but it rarely feels necessary.

Here the distinction between postmodern and neomodern intention matters. In postmodern art, intention is often to question rather than affirm—to show how meanings and truths are constructed, to keep any claim unstable. In neomodern thinking, intention shifts from deconstructing to reconstructing. It aims to re‑engage form, coherence, and some notion of seriousness or value, while fully aware that old absolutes are gone. The artist’s intention is to create works that can still carry authenticity, humanity, depth, and aesthetic or even ethical ideals, even if those ideals are modest and historically aware.

As my own practice developed, my Ethos crystallized around three qualities: craftsmanship, composition, and sublimity. Craftsmanship is the visible record of years spent learning how color behaves, how edges meet, how a surface can be alive without being busy. High craft separates a work from the mass of images that flood our eyes; it demands respect and invites the viewer to imagine the labor of another human being

Composition is the art of “god‑like” completeness: the sense that nothing essential is missing and nothing extraneous is present. It is unity: how forms, spaces, and colors are arranged so that the picture feels inevitable. A strong composition does more than arrange objects nicely; it creates a small, self‑contained world that holds together in the mind

Sublimity—or Majesty—is what happens when craftsmanship and composition rise to the level of what Joseph Campbell, following Thomas Aquinas and James Joyce, called “aesthetic arrest”. Campbell, building on Aquinas, spoke of three qualities of beauty: integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony or proportion), and claritas (radiance). Joyce emphasized “arrest”: proper art, for him, is that which stops you—not by shock, but by stillness. Aesthetic arrest is the moment when a work feels whole, ordered, and luminous enough that you cannot simply glance and move on.

I aspire to that kind of arrest in modest subjects. The canvas becomes a way to give form to a particular state of consciousness or inner idea, rather than just to arrange objects. My references sit with Impressionism, Modernism, and older sacred or symbolic traditions, but the motifs remain domestic and local: a vase on a table, a room in changing light, a landscape seen often enough to feel like memory. You are not just seeing what I saw; I hope you are recognizing something essential about your own experience.

All of this unfolds through a process I summarize as “new tools, old ambitions.” Many paintings begin as quick AI or digital studies: a way to explore color, pattern, and composition at speed. In that phase, everything is possible. But only a few images are carried forward into paint. By the time a motif reaches linen, it has been tested against looking, corrected by drawing, and transformed by slow layers of oil and glaze. What began as a new image aims to feel already lived‑with—familiar, slightly worn, and human in scale.

In a culture of frictionless digital images, I want these works to live in real rooms and to offer a slower, sustained encounter with light, color, and presence. “What’s new is old again” is not nostalgia for a lost past; it is my way of saying that the newest tools can still serve the oldest ambitions of painting: to make visible what moves us, to hold us still for a moment, and to remind us that, despite everything we have learned about contingency and construction, some images still matter more than others