My work concerns the space between abstraction, imagination, and reality.  I am constantly searching for shapes that spark an association.  This association should hint at what the image is about without overtly defining it, and yet it should give me enough information so that I can paint it.  It has to be, in some way, a shape that seems real to me.

These paintings were created over several years and reflect an assortment of ideas and concerns.  It is interesting to look back at these, and see the thread of the development of an idea emerge, change, and grow into the next painting.  Each painting is about a specific set of shapes and their relationship to the edge of the canvas.  The shapes have a broken quality to them.  At times they allude to a fragment of a figure, or to a geometric shape that has been broken.  Some of these paintings use an imaginary garden as the focus and the forms grow from this.  In the garden paintings I think of the space as being bent, rather than broken.  Over the years these shapes have always had similarities with previous shapes, and yet they seem to change.  They can begin as a torso and transform into an angular saw blade, or something that resembles a tribal figure from Cameroon.  The shapes have been found through the process of painting and repainting.  They have evolved over time and have been adjusted to create the right color, light, and mood.  This is an intuitive method of working that fine tunes the color and shape until it seems right.  While I have personal associations with these shapes, they are meant to be interpreted by the viewer.  They can mean many things to different people.

While the major shapes in the paintings are centrally located other shapes and lines have been developed to create a tension with the edge of the canvas.  The edge of the canvas is a fixed and powerful part of the painting.  It has a physical presence and it gives the painting a movement and energy through the tension that it forms with the internal shapes.  I have tried to establish a balanced color and visual relationship between the shapes.  A relationship that is not static but a color relationship that seems to move on the canvas.

Like the shapes, the colors are mixed and repainted repeatedly.  I search for a color that offers me a sense of the light within a painting.  Through color I try to bring an inner light to the shapes that I have created.  The color should have an earthy quality to it.  It should reflect the colors of the natural world, and yet it should have enough drama to bring the painting into its own.  I employ a traditional value structure to try to make the shapes seem as though they have a life in my imaginary world.    I hope that between the color, value, and light I am able to bring the shapes into their own, to give them their own separate reality.

The works on paper take on a different look than the paintings on canvas.  This is dictated in part by the difference in the materials.  The works on paper use an assortment of media while the work on canvas is generally painted in oil.  The media in the works on paper can include watercolor, acrylic, gouache, ink, collage, charcoal, and graphite.  Since the scale is smaller they have a more intimate quality.  Text is often used to trigger an image, although the text can be half buried in the surface of the work.  These pieces are in some ways about memory.  They often use materials that I gathered when my mother moved from her house into a condominium, or from old books, or while traveling.  In cleaning out some drawers at my mother’s house I came across playing and tarot cards from my childhood as well as an old sailing manual.  These triggered such memories that they began to creep into the work.

  One of the series of drawings was inspired by a novel by Denis Johnson called Fiskadoro.  My interpretation is not so much text based but instead the series took off from the book and into my own meditation on the narrative.

  The small collages are from the Travel Tales group.  This ongoing series was start in 1998 and continues to the present.  They are sometimes made in hotel rooms while traveling, but more often they are made when I return to the studio.  They include source material like ticket stubs and hotel receipts.  Several years ago as a way of keeping my source material, and eliminating the risk of the collage items fading, I began to scan the images and print them onto high quality paper with archival inks.  It allows certain images, like a Documenta ticket to be repeated whenever it seems appropriate.  These are a visual scrapbook.   They are intimate and can trigger a specific response or memory.

The most recent works on paper, Torso/Trunk, all use the trunk of a figure, or perhaps the trunk of a tree as their starting point.  Years ago when a friend and fellow painter visited my studio he remarked that it was like being in a tree house because it is on the second floor and surrounded by mature trees.  I find the relationship, or perhaps the association of the trunk of a tree with the human torso to be fascinating.  They yield a wide variety of textures and colors to work with and simply staring out of my studio window is visually rewarding. 

In many ways the paintings on paper are representative of the work that I have made for nearly thirty years, existing in an uneasy truce with the works on canvas.  The works on paper are not studies but, rather complete works in and of themselves.  It is a journey that never ceases to astound me, and certainly never bores me.