Paintings

“Figure” 2021

This new series is arising from my psyche and Spirit. The past year of semi-isolation has given me time to spend in solitude, in nature, and in relation to a larger sense of Self. I’m curious what these will evoke for other people. Click any thumbnail to get a better look in a slide show.

Grand Canyon 2018

Still drawing on my experiences of the power of the Grand Canyon, the images are becoming looser and more paradoxical–echoes and ghosts of places. Most works shown here are available for $350.

Echoes of the Grand Canyon 2016-8

I am focused on the feeling of confrontation between small human perceptions and the outrageous physical force of the Grand Canyon, which I experienced on an eight-day rafting trip. The canyon holds you at arms’ length even while it crushes you with sensations of heat, light, brilliance and immensity. Haunting profiles of cliff, rim, and mesa are repeated through eons of formation, through miles of travel. I intend to keep exploring the moods and sensations of the canyon in my paintings.

2016 paintings – Form and Formlessness

The poet Elizabeth Bishop insists, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” but as soon as she says that, you know she’s lying.

As we grow old, the questions of appearance and disappearance, the possibility of fading away and becoming background—these become hard to avoid. Aging brings us closer to the boundary between being and unbeing, brings us to an ambiguous territory, where it may happen that forms have vanished, leaving you with nothing to grasp. Or they have not yet come into being.

We usually gravitate to what’s moving and full of contrast and drama. How is it that the background, the boring parts, can become the foreground? How is it that nothingness acquires  texture and heft?

My work relates to that of Bill Jensen, his use of “empty” space, his Buddhist references, his deeply textured surfaces. His work seems to ask whether we have importance in the universe, or is it our lack of significance that is of significance?

Emergent, inchoate. It is paradoxical that forms can appear to be emergent when really the work has undergone a process of paring down, reduction. The events and attachments of a lifetime must be expunged in places to make space. The simplicity that emerges is not the same as original innocence.

2014-5 From the Woods

My paintings pay tribute to nature not by reproducing scenes, but by borrowing gestures, textures, lines, colors, and spaces. Shapes made by branches, root systems, capillaries, clouds, and puddles all can be discerned within the dense mesh of the paintings. I begin with amorphous washes of color and then respond to what’s on the canvas by adding shapes and textures. Layer piles upon layer and must be simplified and resolved by overall patterns and color harmonies. It feels similar to the complexity of a long life. Louise Fishman and Bill Jensen are major influences on my work.