Artist Statement

My paintings are directly informed by the 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 start from nothing, (a blank canvas), which takes time to build up, to become familiar with an idea when it finally shows up. Beginning a painting is an act of faith. The more the source of life in an idea expands, the easier it becomes to explore new pathways within it. Solutions lead to more solutions, like windows opening through to more windows. If I like how they make me feel, I keep exploring them.  I can never quite get there, which is why I keep going after them. If I get stuck and don’t know what to do next, I stick my head up into the sky and feel the magnitude of a larger force, the reaction to which is to push back by actively searching further.

Whenever I have ever gone to the painting with an idea from the previous painting, the act of touching paint quickly undoes the idea. I allow myself to tightrope my way in without a net underneath, by allowing the paint to guide me through. I look for spatial relationships right away; the color finds the shape, creates the volume between colors. Once ideas start connecting, the dialogue between ideas becomes like a narrative story I am telling, (a call and response between them).

 I work oil on canvas (the abstract paintings), and oil crayon on paper (the landscape drawings). I scrape away what does not work: in painting with a pallet knife, and in drawing with a razor blade to remove the oil crayon, then drawing into the crayon with the razor. Nothing scraped gets discarded: I reuse everything. When oil paint gets scraped, the mud color is warmed up or cooled down with another color in order to obtain the exact temperature range. I even use the color that sank to the bottom of the can to begin another painting with thin washes. Just a really excellent quality of oil paint dictates the application thinner or straight from the tube, but all 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.                  

 How I place shapes together becomes the structure in both the paintings and the drawings: ‘(where’ they exist in space in relationship to each other).  The picture plane in the paintings 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. In the landscapes everything that exists between gravity and sky exists in relationship to everything else, (i.e., the sky pulls back further proportionately to the foreground coming forward).        

 The general misunderstanding of a painting is due to missing it’s spiritual and technical qualities. If the observer’s eye is not trained to equate formal visual problems with them, (such as where things exists in space in relation to each other),  he/she will search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a painting, looking for representational things instead of music-like relationships.        

  Each of my paintings represents a crystallized chunk of formal experience, while being very personal at the same time. My paintings are earthy, rock-like, and weighty, and yet they have in them the rhythm of the sea.  I am a nature painter; the nature “out there” coupled with my own internal landscape.  My inner finds the equivalent “out there.” My painting process is unsettling, passionate, radical, and driven. Altogether, a body of paintings becomes like the movements of a symphony that take a year or more to fully realize. Each painting has immediacy to it, but takes time to complete; it’s my own personal paradox. The painting is the consequence of technique and skill brought about by the concept. That is how what ends up on my canvas gets said, and how my paintings come to be.

The work brings the themes of light and motion forward into present time and space, and strives to impart energy to the viewer in a lasting way.