Not My Eyes

52x70x4 Inches

I have encountered people who experienced life vicariously through movies. I will admit to wanting to see something or someone so I manage to create it in a painting. This process started out long ago in far more modest scale as a boy of 16. A visual condition which defines an original work like no other is texture. Sculptural relief really is only a texture scaled up. In ‘Not My Eyes’ as often is true I needed incompatible elements. I wanted you and I to see this supple and beautiful draping pose. I was even willing to paint her in cool turquoise in contrast to primarily warm background with cool complimentary accents. Not allowing you to escape ‘looking’ at her. To make something compelling in the best way is to make it irresistible and morally repugnant simultaneously. Of course the repugnant part is where the denial starts. I was equally committed to the sensuality of the back ground as the pose. To see this painting in person is to be simultaneously caught by its texture/color and sexuality. When I speak of this painting I use the term barroom nude. That does not come close to revealing how I feel about this girl, this fantasy, this picture though. The challenge here, not the only one by any means, was to paint the reclining woman with her legs akimbo retain dignity while providing intrigue for the audience and myself. Let the seduction happen . More like get out of the way.

Brownie

2014

Oil on board, Internally sculpted, Collection of the artist

44 x 60 x 1/34 Inches

Spectrum

2012

Oil on panel over sculpted foam

60X48 Inches

Mood is paramount in art. Can you imagine life without the caprice it offers? I can not name a single other element that is more significant. Duke Ellington -Frank Lloyd Wright- Francis Bacon – Rodin- Fellini –Baudelaire, so many others;they transport us via the extraordinary mood their art delivers . Their unique states of mind are provided for us to step into and escape out of our frame of reality. SPECTRUM is an illusive image for me.I wanted to paint a woman walking through a dimly lit passage with rays of light passing through on a diagonal, illuminating random dust particles, she would have an allure, she would be provocative. When light grazed her body it would illuminate her in a spectrum of color not unlike a prism separates hues and displays them a single bands of color blending softly: a rainbow………..this much was in my minds eye. Locks of hair would partially obscure her face, one arm raised asymmetrically; striding forward, eyes leveled……and that much was in the sketch. As the whole began to take form someone visiting the studio. Encountered the picture said,” she looks like a woman walking down the side of a dark lonely highway, a streetwalker”. I was intrigued by that term. I did not think of a sex professional when I heard the statement and was not interested in that innuendo, rather the mystery .Who is she, and what is she, where is he going and where did she come from….. the unknown.

Fertility

72 x 52 x 6 Inches

Art gives the viewers mind what it needs most…distraction. Appeasing the senses with form and color disconnected from reality is the turf of the abstract painter. Yet I believe that every successful painting has an abstraction at its foundation. The decisions one makes along the way is just how much to sublimate the subject. Knowingly supervising, suspending the viewers attention in pure color and with the round sculpted egg forms, revealing the figure second, was my intent. These egg like shapes are the most purely sculptural forms I have used yet in these 3-D works. Composition and mood are established prior to noticing the figure. One eye drops back through the forms all the way to the openings in the painting to the wall behind the picture. That kind of displacement provides momentary disorientation for the intellect, and the ability to use the wall be hind as an internal compositional element. This is one of the special kinds of pleasure a painting can deliver.

Ballet

Oil on Canvas over Sculpted Foam

68x48 Inches

Steppin’ Out

73 X 96 X 6 Inches

2003

Oil on canvas over sculpted foam & mixed media on panel, brushed bronze (2 panels) 

Harbinger

2015

65 X 96 Inches

Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas over Board

There are opportunities when creating a painting to utilize the same substance as medium that one is describing as subject. This is true of the foreground hillside described in “Harbinger”. The big horned mountain goat and its young are seen plodding up a grooved terraced hillside. I built up the ground on the canvas over board surface with a thick impasto of sand and mineral under their hooves. I then carved sanded and stained it with tertiary (earth) tones. 
 Mother goat and kid are being beckoned to a mystical event by the distant music of a legendary Hopi entity. He can be seen, perched on a ledge in the middle ground right above. The same tribal mystic, the horn blower, is pictured in a petroglyph (barium red) in the foreground rocks, under the goat’s surefooted strides.

The Hopi ancient artist describes the calling to witness a mystic event about to unfold in the painting. This part is not a fiction. I saw the ancient red image while running in the hills surrounding Canyonland Park and the clearing of assembled boulders from a distance near Lake Powell of southern Utah. Helen and I were following a trail of known Hopi and native American cave and rock petroglyphs , indicated on a map.
 The whirlpool like arrangements of clouds in sky convey foreboding, gathered above the clearing of arranged boulders below, where the event will take place. The lightning and general mood foretell of the approaching cataclysmic moment, one of supernatural significance manifest by the gathering cosmic forces. 

 This picture was prompted by the arrival of the year of the goat, the 8th sign in the Chinese Zodiac. The Chinese interpretation of the goat is one who is gentle and cooperative. The western astrological interpretation however, visualized in a constellation of stars observed by Greek sailors; the goat is formidable, very determined, completing its trek up the hill despite danger and difficulty. I have always been in awe at the appearance and poise of mountain goats (ironically my birth occurred astrologically under Capricorn, represented by the goat)….The big horn goat, So at ease in environments of uncertainty and danger, never making a misstep (if that were only true of me). 

Our runs and explorations led me to another location in the southern Utah desert, where it transforms into the “Valley of the Kings”. A region of magnificent rock formations, where violent erosion from rivers carved out towering sculptures of stone during in the primordial era. I felt something preternaturally strong from these places while there. The feeling travelled with me through the years, ultimately moving me to create this picture in the year of the Goat..

Woman in High Back Chair

2014

Oil On Canvas Over Sculpting Foam, Fabricated Aluminum

Blissfully dozing, head resting on her shoulder and lips parted. Her breasts the shape of summer fruit and limbs gathered comfortably. Her peacefulness still amazes me for all the industry which took amid her slumber. It was a long process with this picture; engaging, inspired and tedious at times. The transformation from graphite drawing to 3-D painting was gradual. I spent a year from rough oil sketch to completed assembly of the 60 separate parts spread out on my studio floor. Every methodology I possess was called upon; ink drawing, oil and impasto painting, whittling sculpting and shaping the foam, cutting up then adhering the canvas, fabricating the aluminum, carpentry of the hidden frame. The sitting surface of the chair is constructed from bent aluminum tubing wrapped around a steel armature. The upper chair back is solid spokes positioned radial, cut and integrated to the hidden Lewan wood(lightweight) armature within the piece. All the metallic surfaces etched and sanded in my studio , have a uniform untarnished patina. The pale alloy is sufficiently light and the 60 pieces are canvas over sculpted foam, Alone, I can pick up the 62X50 inch piece and hang it on the wall. The rigid solidity and lightness is a feat worth mentioning as I keep in mind the probable habitat when making these sculptural paintings. This too a philosophical tenet worthy of note, as I am not an elitist. Ultimately it matters greatly to NOT place oneself above the audience,.. Outsizing the walls that people live within implies the artist is targeting museums or privileged environments. I do not. No one assists in the fabrication of my drawings, paintings or sculptures. What the viewer entreats is entirely a product my own hands and mind. My works are uncompromisingly original. There is thick impasto of gritty paint covering the various surfaces of the canvas pieces. I used a bakers icing trowel ,palette knives and brushes of all sizes to apply the color/sand mix to the surface. In closing I would leave you with an intended paradox; the rough cut shapes, brusque and thick, application of paint is devoted to describing one who is precious and vulnerable, she is asleep.

Male Figure With Brushes

Oil On Canvas over Sculpted Foam

47 x 41 Inches

Leap Male and Female

The Legend of Sekret

Oil and Modeling Paste on Canvas Over Board

2015

65 X 45 Inches

She blows the candle out and leaves you. Jasmine plumes fill the darkened space. She assumes her place, upon the ancient wall. Poised like a precious artifact in the depth of the pharaoh’s horde she cannot be awakened by your imperfect need. As you were dead she is alive.

She is Sekret, your guide through the darkness of time. You arise and walk. With arms outstretched your trembling palms move flatly across the wall feeling the freize carved from quarried stone in deep below the Pyramid, just a sightless man searching for antediluvian truth. You plainly remember it, as you floated behind; it was inscribed upon her limbs as she walked. You saw it in your unconscious mind, the map inscribed upon her legs showed the way, your passage through the underworld.... when you were together.

Now you move along the wall of the crypt. Your searching fingers find the edge of a baas relief, seeking the contours of her akimbo symmetric limbs. She is now but a lifeless form, a frieze yet you can sense her near, she will be forever your deepest yearning. Your weakened spirit is aroused despite passing a millennium without a heartbeat; the candle scent hangs in the air. The outlined dimension of her torso, bosom and face crystallize, manganese green blue and raw umber hallucinated in your darkened mind’s eye. You have begun to live. The meaning of your journey is slowly revealed by your hungry touch and fragmented priestly mind. Revealed upon her immobile limbs ,her Coptic whisper in your ear, from softened aloe lips and scented breath, while levitated behind her, subdued under centuries of sleep.

Your fingertips now decipher tiny brail eggs of the universe escaping from her womb, transforming into the family of man rising, sojourning up to the planets ,under the guidance of all seeing Hermes. His eye gazes down upon the western world with its primitive spires and geometry. The coming millennium will be theirs and you will preside. Teetering atop her tattooed knee Hermes illuminates the present as he gazes west. Yet the mocking dolphin nibbles at your outstretched hand. The Dolphin tending to lost celestial sailor's souls, it crests the apex of her other knee mocking the illusion of man’s supremacy.

Fauves

2012

60 x 43 x 5 Inches

Oil on Canvas Over Sculpted Foam

I was indulging a universal and personal need in this picture. The caring, holding, embracing protecting nature of love. I want it for my children and wife, myself and everyone I have ever known. I opted for the colors of the forest and found myself creating a man who was built like a tree and a female that was as violet as a forest nymph. The way her left leg wraps around his one sturdy leg is my favorite part of the picture.

Rider

59X47 Inches

 Many of the male nudes I painted 1997-99,focused on the torso.the male torso lies in the realm of the Hero and Greek sculptural tradition if not obsession .preoccupied with inventing interesting ways to present a torso, seated upon a horse was one solution.The head of the horse and the mask of the rider became satisfactory compositional elements.this painting retained an academic beauty in sketch form.After applying the first layer of burnt orange paint that preciousness increased.I sat with that picture for one year before cutting it into 60 pieces and popping it out into three dimensions .The deconstruction and reconstruction process requires some courage sometimes a leap of faith.To abandon something which has superficial beauty in order to mine for deeper beauty is a process which includes the risk of total loss.

Bed of Stone

60x84 Inches

A very difficult painting. Self-portraitive {for lack of the model} subsequently self identification set in.loneliness passion, yearning, loss ,memory. The female muse on one side either a specter or a object of memory. The reaching male figure on the other.{'you can't put your arms around a memory"} the mass and weight of the figure is anecdoted by the silliness of the jester cap, the internal spirit of the figure curves into the space above the head, following the lines of the carefree cap as if to continue it. The thrust of this painting rests on the bed itself.I sculpted these forms to reveal inner life force within the stones{since you cannot physically see inside the figure} suggested by the color, some cool, some hot. The discomfort of the rocks against the weight the figure relates to the overall emotion of the painting. The painting was three years of constant turmoil and work. The wild curvilinear burnt sienna lines dry brushed background was very first act in creating this painting .Ultimatly the lines are popped out as they pass thru the mid- section of the figure itself.

Peace Pipe

2003

Oil on canvas over sculpted foam

48x41x3 Inches

Copper Bonnet

Oil On Canvas

40X32 Inches

Oil and metal are the bedfellows of industry. A rich contrast arises visually when they are interposed in an artistic context as well.  In “Copper Bonnet” the cold black ivory skin of the seated Haitian is at one end of the aesthetic spectrum and the warm brushed copper at the other(aesthetic-to feel, anesthetic-as before surgery,no feeling). The irony, these two elements are of the highest contrast (intensity) virtually separating themselves from all of the other detail. In the picture before you, color is inseparable from texture. Add the brushy movement in the background, the result is instinctive Mango. I can think of no school of painting to fit this into. I was born with the’ know how ‘to work this way. We are talkin’ the interposition of form, color, texture, movement retaining a sense of realism. I had it down via trial and error long before I went to art school (and found what I could already do was not teachable anyway).   The cobalt violet and green behind fit neatly in middle of the fore mention spectrum , book ended by copper and black. The orange is a slight color subordinate of the copper color(very close).Orange is revealed under the black sanded away from her impasto’d arms and upper torso(I laid it under the black several days before planning on scraping away later).Orange serves as an allied sensory link between Bonnet and Stool. The brilliant blue derived similarly by sanding off areas of the black legs , complimenting the orange. I laid blue under days before as well planning the other color concert event later. The two arms and bowed torso provide negative spaces to poise the fruit-like breasts and allow the background color design to be observed looking through to background. I could not be happier with spacing of the arms and torso, for me it is the magic which makes this picture, of which I am very fond.

Copper Pages

Oil on Canvas

60X48 Inches

‘Copper Pages’ was derived from a sketch of Magdalena reading a book while seated in a film directors chair. I re-drew the sketch on a canvas which I had adhered to a hardboard panel. It's surface was a thickly impasto’d sand applied with a large bakers palette knife with umber tones underneath. I was stilled by its appearance.So much so I left it was for several years. The panel haunted the corners of my studio, ever evoking my gaze over that period, provoking me all the while, I found myself conjuring poses.. . I like a surface to have an abstract appeal before a pose is introduced, the longer it remains the more invested my vision upon its surface. I like the picture to lead me forward as if it knows what it wants to be.This keeps me from insisting on my own preconceptions. I would compromise with what existed already and amend my pose to adapt to passages of hardened sand. The craggy surface had the arbitrary beauty of cracks in the sidewalk or an old Tuscan wall... When I set to work I did not use charcoal stick or pencil, rather I chose a thick round tortured old paint brush, I dipped it in thinned forest green oil paint; I sketched her on this canvas panel with that brush.A blunt tool allows ones primitive soul to arise. The surface was bumpy and deckled, the brush coursed over the milieu unpredictably allowing mostly accidents and invention ,only spare detail survived the original ‘seated girl sketch’ when complete. This was good. The balance of the work would be choosing which detail to elevate and carve in hard plaster shapes and then illuminate with the brilliant color . I craft painting surfaces in such a way;authenticity is reliant on the texture. (a copy machine can make a perfect reproduction of a dollar bill. It is the texture felt in your hand that testifies it’s genuine) This phenomena applies in the extreme in our epoch when all things are reproduced digitally.The striped blue pants are thick but smoothly modeled plaster and scored deeply with chisel and sanding wheel and then painted cerulean with lavender in the deep grooves. The red blouse has a ‘wet’ look to the paint emphasizing’ here and now’ . The chair elements stand up to an inch above the canvas, burnt orange which is closest in hue to the background sand. Primary colors are forward. Surface texture slows down the perceptual process- seems to allow a color or a shape to exist on their own, something luscious! A morsel food tasted alone, it reaches one’s taste bud before the rest of the sauce, not strictly as an element tamed in a composition.

My Pretty Bird

2007 

Oil On Canvas over Sculpted Foam

65 x 54 Inches

The first bass relief painting I had done in a year and the first ever with an extensively abstracted muse. The 3-D forms are full shapes and they perform sculpturally to the same degree they do graphically. Colors are wielded in streams in all directions traversing the Oxide yellow (feels like gold) background and Prussian blue body. The color has tastes; licorice, vanilla and juju ruby red, ginger drops. Like one with a with sweet tooth that has just discovered an x-tra large box of M&M’s and is determined to try and satisfy the craving by trying every hue. The background figure and purple pods beneath her knees are painted in the utterly flat paint, devoid of gloss, rendering a velvet quality. The strands of color criss-crossing the matt rectangle conversely are maximum gloss to intensify vividness by contrast. The difference between flat and textured gloss is palpable when one stands in front of the picture. These braids of sweetly tinctured hues are mixed with sand to increase their palatable sensory dimension. I was full of anticipation with the pose, its wide boxy layout promised sufficient negative spaces for an aggressive popping out of 3-D form. If substituting the hour glass shape with a boxy , curveless design portends a less than feminine result,I had the antidote: an endearing coquettish expression, contrasting no apparent glamour in the rectilinear body. Her haughty little friend with feathers simpers to the left with matching conceit.

Running Figure With Mask

Oil on Canvas over Sculpted Foam and Brushed Aluminum

56X46 Inches

The desire to explore or reveal something deeper of the life experience is a primal force of figurative art .Deconstruction of the painted figure in a plastic way, the illusion of taking it apart ,exploding it and illustrating that process is apparent in Picassos many Cubists masterpieces(more decoratively in those by Braque,Leger and Gris)Francis Bacon and Wilhelm de Kooning achieved equally brilliant results not long after, if not more aggressively. Notably in the de Kooning 'Woman'series. The desire to take it apart turn it inside out, allows the substitution of paint for the internal body substances.An outrageously captivating experience .My paintings of the late 1990s and beyond are animated by the same instincts as my heroic predecessors. The difference , after I draw it and paint I physically cut up ,I do not illustrate. I do physically deconstruct the painting.after it is sketched and painted I take a razor and reduce it to 70 or 80 small pieces. Thus begins the process of reconstruction. The pieces are adhered to varying thicknesses of non-biodegradable construction grade foam. A process of overlapping and interposing painting ,carving, , and eventually reassembling of those pieces begins. In" running figure" the primal urge spread from the deconstruction of the limbs and torso to the construction of a mask and then into totemic background. Whenever a mask developes things African begin to happen naturally . The broad cross etchings were extensively practiced in my youth. Possibly ingested during a period of obsession with Vincent van Gogh, age 14. I was a student of the Art Institute of Chicago. Constantly roaming endless impressionistic galleries of the museum. The white line on dark background is achieved not by brush application. Deepened strokes are scribed in into wet polymer/mixed with marble stone dust. Dark umber is applied after it dries. When that surface dries lightly sanding the r idges produces white lines. Which contribute to the African-totemic quality. The incorporation of brushed aluminum and brushed copper is another departure from traditional European derived painting styles. Which I learned interspersed if not long after years of a assembla'ge, working with every conceivable found material. I've noticed that Jasper John's has made a considerable living from the cross hatchet style. Even referencing' crying Dutch women' a la the school of Dutch painting 1500+. I can honestly say that Jap bore no influence at all upon my progress. Although a generation apart I too was awed by Marcel Duchamp

Moonlight

Oil and Mixed Media on Panel

40X32 Inches

A woman I know well was brushing her hair in reverse from the nap of her neck forward. She was cantilevered in such a way to allow her hair fall freely untangled.  Her long beautiful back possessed an accentuated and sturdy spine allowing a graceful arc to be possible. The knurls and irregularities in ones spine may not be thought of as conventionally beautiful. Within my aesthetic the skeletal understructure implies Dynamism.     Moonlight softly illuminating the viscera, the time of day suggests privacy and solitude. The picture locates her at a waterfall; I suppose I yearn for a time when the stream was not only a place to go for self maintenance but a place to see reflected ones soul.    My love’s hair was auburn at the time so in I felt justified pushing the muse’s hair all the way to red,. Once introduced I had to bounce the red quietly through the picture, even at midnight.   All the surfaces in the picture have three-dimensionality; the water falling vertically from the falls is thickly grooved and her body is contoured with palette knife in modeling paste creating a modest texture throughout until one discovers the stone upon which she sits is virtually real. A tromploiel surface painted upon sculpted hard foam. Something like a stage set boulder. The paintings mood and subject a touch prosaic, beg the romantic sensibility from the viewer. This in contrast to the discovery that the boulder protrudes unexpectedly 3 inches off the surface. Ive watched onlookers do a double take- at first not sure if it is protruding out or illustrated as such. The cracks and crevices are painted in detail and then ;”is it a real boulder ?”.Touching informs a counterfeit; an artistic illusion.  For me in that moment of perceptual confusion, a traditional ‘old fashion’ painting subject induces a post-modern quirk.