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.