Artist Statement

        My painting is an act of faith. When I make a painting breakthrough, I am exhilarated and accomplished, which gives my life meaning. This is how I made painting so central to how I would live my life from very early on. I have a visual documentation of how I have spent my time here on earth through the growth of my paintings over 50 years.  How ideas connect to the whole of each painting is what sets the emotional tone of the painting. I get visions before they even do, and then find them on canvas, which takes a long time to locate in each painting. I have an incessant curiosity to stay present in the moment of seeing. The drive ‘to get it right’ only looms larger in time, though I can never quite get there. I work a painting until it has evolved as far as I can move it along, without losing its initial impact. The search is what gives the painting its source of life, not in the ‘getting there.’ No painting is ever finished; I just take it off the easel to take what good is in the last painting to expand it further in the one yet to come.  

       It is a meaningful life to have a passion live in me this strongly. Compositional ideas, coupled with an inner light I get through the harmonies and dissonances of color, occur to me I had not seen when I was right in front of the painting, in my sleep, or when I’d be out for my sunset walk, and those ideas were always the right ones.

        Bruce Chatwin’s “Song Lines” describes aboriginal people communicating at geographical distances through the earth. I get my messages from the earth. I was a dancer for decades and now a yogi, relying on my body to guide me. My arms reach out to the canvas up from my feet rooted down.

       My paintings are informed by Impressionists and the Abstract expressionists. Compositional concepts absorbed decades ago are continually evolving within me to this day. I best express my most passionate realities, (the story beneath ordinary everyday life things), producing on canvas much of what people feel when they get religious. I look for spatial relationships: the picture plane changes constantly through the volume that color creates, (in a constant state of relational movement). What one thinks is coming forward then shoots back when in relationship to something else coming forward. When oil paint gets scraped, the mud color is warmed up or cooled down with another color to obtain the exact temperature range.

     Though my paintings may appear may appear gestural or loose, they are, in fact, the result of months of precise work. I hand-build and stretch the canvas surfaces with drum-tight tension. My drips are not accidents, but decisions. Nothing is casual. This is painting as a physical argument—deliberate, intimate, and fiercely alive. 

       I work oil on canvas, scraping away what does not formally work, with a pallet knife, but nothing scraped gets discarded: I reuse everything. I even use the color that sank to the bottom of the can to begin another painting with thin washes, so I don’t have to start from a completely blank canvas.

      Just a really excellent quality of oil paint dictates the application thinner or straight from the tube, but most my colors are mixed. I only use five colors; with those, I can get every color: cadmium yellow light, cadmium red deep, cobalt blue, thalo blue, and titanium zinc white.  Only cobalt blue is used straight, as it is always sky.             

      The drive ‘to get it right’ gives the painting its source of life, alive in the mystery of its existence coming to the fore.  When the salient concept and feeling in a painting are finally revealed, I fine tune them until all the formal visual elements connect more solidly.  I take what I most responded to, and believed in, in the painting, to move it further in the painting yet to come. One painting begets the new one.  Ideas occur to me I had not seen when I was right in front of the painting, in my sleep, or when I’d be out for my sunset walk, and those ideas were always the right ones. My visual memory, while exacting, the process of executing it takes a long time to paint.

      I always knew painting was hard and would take all of me to keep getting better, as a way of life. In my earlier work I was trying too hard, but now there is so much more pleasure in the search, the wonder. Process has to be the root of it—not the finding, but in the handling oil paint anew each time. The paint finds the concept.