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March 29, 2014   

I touch the canvas to feel its bite. I begin the image by drawing in broad arcs and swoops with paint sticks to define the space in which i will work. The curves provide a framework for the image. The color of the arcs and swoops informs the next layers. I prefer earthy purples and viridians. I wash transparent color over the acs. It kills the white and further creates the space. Siennas, umbers, purples, viridians and greens are good. At this point I will often drag lines in black or purple across the canvas with a long bristled filbert brush, twirling the brush and changing directions to evoke organic edges. The lines create more space and hold the next layers of paint like a scaffold. Broad semi-opaque strokes are next. I mix zinc white with pigments to produce opaque color that is informed by what is covers. More squiggly lines follow along with more opaque brush strokes and splotches and splatters. i build up a web of lines and brush strokes and splatters reminiscent of Jackson Pollack paintings. Next, I Introduce a random element by folding the canvas and pressing paint into paint. Now the web is at its most random and and most pregnant state. I use opaque brush strokes and lines And palette knives to begin to tease out an image. This can be a quick and obvious process, most times it is slow, like reeling in a huge fish from the deep. I start the painting with no concept of what I want the image to be. However i do have expectations for the type of image that I want produce. I want it to be primitive and powerful, elegant and meaningful. Lately, I feel a strong connection with prehistoric art. I often think of the animal images from the cave at Lascaux and other, so-called, primitive art. The image emerges from line and space and organic and chaotic paint. I work back an forth with line, flat bush strokes, splatters and my fingers. If I am successful, the image is both visually and psychologically powerful. It invites multiple viewpoints and interpretations. It is not visual slight-of-hand. The image is an invitation to the viewer to wonder. I invite you to wonder about time and space and craft and content. I give you a framework, and a starting point, to muse about what it means to be human.

February 1, 2014   

I am working on paper with pigment again. It has been a long time. I felt a connection with an earlier body of work, now decades old. But my sensibilities have evolved. The earlier work was all painted plein air. The new work is made in the studio at night. But still, the unpredictability of aqueous media is exciting. The immediacy is gratifying, when it works.

January 29, 2014   

My cousin gave me a copy of a photograph of my father as a child of about ten years old. I had not seen the photograph until recently, years after my father's death. The photograph is very telling. It is black and white and dates approximately from the time of the end of World War II.

In the photograph, my father is standing straight, facing the camera squarely. His long arms hang by his sides, expressionless. He is holding in his right hand the left hand of his little sister, my future aunt, who is about three years old in the photograph. She stands at his right side. My father's left hand hangs open and expressionless. His feet are parallel, about four inches apart, aimed straight at the camera. In short, in his posture he is giving nothing away, and by that expressionless stance, he gives everything away. My future aunt, in vivid contrast to my father, is smiling. She is looking up and away, at something other than the photographer. She is a study in whites. Her short curly hair is white. Her skin is white. Her short dress is white. Only her ankle-high boots are dark. The toes are cut out of her boots.

My father is a study of contrasting lights and darks. His white face is outlined by a black background. He is wearing a white button-down shirt with an open collar. Over his shirt is a unzipped sweater-jacket. He is wearing creased and folded baggy pants that grab the shadows. His hair is neatly combed, adding to the formal feeling of the photograph.

My father and his sister stand side by side on flat ground that is grassy but worn. The ground looks well trafficked. Perhaps it was an area traversed by cars. Possibly it is spring, before the grass has recovered from winter. It might be an Easter photograph. Shadows sweep right to left behind them, suggesting late afternoon. If it is an Easter photograph it is curious because there was no attempt pose my father and his sister in front of a church or a house or a park. If it was an Easter photograph, it was a hard Easter. There is no adult in the photograph, just my preadolescent father and his toddler sister. The absence of an adult suggests that by is time in my father's life there were just three of them, my future father, his sister, and his father. By the time that the photograph was taken my father's mother may have already hanged herself.

I imagine that my father's father took the photograph. It has no element of spontaneity. It is stark, uncomfortable for everyone except my future aunt who was too young to respond to the rawness of the time. There is a sense of obligation or documentation behind the photograph. There is no sense of love other than the innocent smile of my father's little sister.

In the photograph my father is looking straight at the camera, making no effort to smile. He looks like he is trying to pose expressionless, defiant of the order to pose. In fact, his face looks pained. His dark eyes look very sad. He is standing straight but he is gawky. Even in the best of circumstances he might have been uncomfortable at that age.

My father's sweater looks too small, sleeves not quite reaching the end of his arms, and that makes him look especially awkward. His pants are too big, bunched at the waist by his belt. There is a patched hole at his right knee. If it was an Easter photograph then my father's family was poor at the time, or he did not have a mother to tell him to wear better pants. That is another piece of evidence that suggests that his mother might have been dead by this time. His shoes are plain, not for Easter Sunday best.

About 20 to 30 feet behind my father and my aunt is a structure that looks like a wood frame garage, with a very large open door that is hinged on the left side. The garage-like structure is attached to a house. The wooden houses in the upper part of the background are close together. On the right side of the barn is a utility pool and a tall plain wooden. The barn door is propped open by a wooden box. The open barn door reveals little inside the building. Plain, rough cut planks give way quickly to black shadow. My father is is silhouetted against the black background formed by the open barn door. It was unintentional, but absolutely fitting, that my father was standing in front of the cavernous black opening of the garage. The gaping black hole behind him, almost enveloping him, fits the emptiness that I image he endured after he found his mother hanging in their attic. Her suicide may have been recent, and the photograph is an unintentional echo of her final act. Or she was soon to do it, and the photograph was an unintentional premonition. Either way, it is a very telling photograph. For me, it is an important photograph because it is an early and troubling glimpse into my father's difficult life. His mother committed suicide when he was young and still vulnerable. He never had a chance. He became an alcoholic. He was an abusive husband and father, and often absent. He had a gambling problem. He never reaped the rewards of his innate intelligence. He was a failure in business. His last years were pathetic. He died too early, estranged from his children.

Children often feel responsible for the misery of their parents. My father was clearly miserable well before I was born. The photograph documents that misery. It releases me from that pre-verbal sense of responsibility for him. I am grateful to my cousin, the daughter of the bright little girl in the photograph, for sharing it with me.

January 21, 2014   

Loneliness stands before me, a wolf foaming at the mouth. There are no other wants. Loneliness eats them. I dream of comfort when you eat my heart. Hideous cruel comfort of loneliness. My wolfish siren. I will starve you by feeding you my guts and my heart. I will pull my bowels through you. Feast on me wolf monster. Eat until you starve. Pull apart the flesh of my throat and leave me with nothing, for you have brought nothing. Your nothing is temptation and it is salvation. Your cruel comfort is my fulcrum. I am yours. You are mine. I will use you.

December 11, 2013   

Sometimes, a painting emerges quickly and wholly, born easily from the swollen belly of artistic imagination. Most times though, for me, painting is an intense struggle, like wrestling with the angels. It is a struggle whose outcome is not assured and all the rules are backwards. A success can mean a stillborn image. A failure can result in something transcendent and alive. Painting at its best is a divine communion, but the process can be brutal. My large paintings are all landscapes at the core. Even the figurative paintings are as much about the space as they are about the figurative elements. The small still lifes are not just paintings of flowers, they are studies of volumes of space. I started painting landscapes in and around Philadelphia and then eventually discovered the pine barrens of south central New Jersey. The pine barrens area is full of streams and ponds, so my plein air paintings often took on the symmetry of reflected landscape forms. Coming to Texas with its big skies and wide open landscapes has brought more atmosphere into my paintings. Texas also sits at a rich and sometimes violent cultural cross roads. There is a deep vein of historical and cultural images to mine.But the paintings are more than just imagery. Texture, color, light, space, symmetry, scale, edge and emergence are all important visual elements. Beyond their iconography, the paintings are also as much about their struggle toward creation as they are about image. The process of pushing a living image through many states toward completion gives it an emergent quality and visual complexity. The push is a very physical process, the paintings reflect that physicality. And at another level, each painting represents a journey into the unknown. I never know where a large painting is going. I only paint and wrestle and wait for the image to be born.

October 16, 2013   

I wanted a title for the show that would work for large and small paintings, figurative, landscape and abstract. Someone once described me as a very liminal person. I didn't know what liminal meant at the time, so I took it as a compliment. Thinking about a title for the show, the concept of liminality came back to me, and seemed to be a good over-arching theme. Liminality is about the threshold experience in ritual, when one is passing from one realm to another. For me, painting is the ritual and it provides the framework for liminal experiences. That can work literally in the visual realm as I push the painting from one state to another. The passage in the painting from state to state creates opportunities for the artist. Interesting edges and creases appear. Emergence becomes a dominant quality. Liminality, or threshold experiences, also work within the artist. Sometimes that inner experience is easier to recognize when I am reemerging into the world, suddenly very tired after wrestling with the angels.

August 10, 2013   

My large paintings derive from landscape imagery. Even the figurative paintings are as much about the space as they are about the figurative elements. The small still lifes are not just paintings of flowers, they are studies of volumes of space. I started painting landscapes in Philadelphia and then eventually discovered the pine barrens of south central New Jersey. The pine barrens area is full of steams and ponds, so my plein air paintings often took on the symmetry of reflected landscape forms. This has transferred to the large paintings too. But the paintings are more than landscape imagery. Texture, color, light, space, symmetry, scale, edge and emergence are all important visual elements. Beyond their iconography, the paintings are also as much about process as they are about image. The process of pushing an image from state to state gives the work an emergent quality and visual complexity. The push is a very physical process, the paintings reflect that physicality.