I found the original entry that Ryan and I were debating.  Here it is:

Statement on Art

August 2007

When I was first seriously studying art as an undergraduate at Indiana University, painting, its history and process was the flotsam and jetsam through which I approached my understanding of art. This is a murky water indeed to wade through to see art. Painting inhabits a world of its own and has its own artistic language and long heritage. You can speak in painting terms of touch, space, tactility, compression and expansion, light and weight and the definitions to these elements will be totally different when you talk about them in the context of say, sculpture, once thought of as paintings’ rival but now its conqueror. So, as a student painter I had a kind of crush on the medium. And while I was learning to ‘shmush’ paint around on canvas – it was a flight of fancy that I could take when I went to the museum, to compare my work to the work on the walls and to say I felt an affinity to the way they did it. I’ve heard other artists – Richard Serra in particular say that there was no way he was going to be able to move paint like Rubens – so why try. He went towards an art making and language all his own. His sheet steel plates constructed in concentric circles of various configurations enclose the viewer inside them – like being in a giant steel flower. This is an experience that is totally interactive and requires a scale of art to rival or even trump the human one. To ‘get into’ a painting requires a conceptual leap. It requires an understanding of the tools of its making to fully appreciate. The image can be approached without this education but the knowledge of the medium of paint is required in order to fully understand ‘painting.’ So, contemporary sculpture beats painting at true unobstructed experience. It’s not required that you know something about rolled steel construction in artistic terms because it doesn’t come from an artistic heritage. It comes from a human-industrial heritage – one that we have all gone through in the last century. Thus, Serra can get right to the human/object interactive experience. Painting takes you back through centuries of history. It is a formidable task to study it.

A professor told me once while I was studying for my graduate degree in painting that film would be the most important medium in the next century (the 21^st). I rigorously denied that, trying to preserve the romantic and personal relationship with my medium. I was an am a film lover and think of some of my favorites as true artistic statements but I was unable at that time to relinquish painting’s stately hierarchy in the arts. This was before YouTube and ubiquitous video and homemade movies on the internet and full motion video on cell phones. I think we’ve entered into an era where personal expression can happen in a matter of seconds and be transmitted all over the world. It’s a powerful new form of artistic expression and I think it will relegate traditional mediums of art to the dusty corners of academia. I’ve not lost the love I have still of painting. I still dream of spending summers totally engrossed in what’s happening in a two-dimensional plane a few feet from my face. I also think that over my lifetime there will still be a few people who rise to broad public consciousness as masters of the medium who bring new ideas from it about the way we see the world and ourselves. It’s just that they’ll be peculiar oddities in the onslaught of image makers pushing art through their digitally web-linked devices across the world.