CURRENT ABSTRACTION

I view the challenge of these paintings to be about maintaining a state of mind—being present, open and unattached to outcomes. Certain forms, colors and gestures assert themselves and flow from one work to the next like an ongoing conversation. I am exploring three or more themes at the same time, cycling from one to the other. Sometimes they overlap. Subjects include an inner psychological landscape, personal memory, and political and interpersonal communication. Ultimately it is a message in a bottle to myself through which I come to understand the world and my reaction to it.

LOCAL COLOR

This series is about reverse engineering Hudson River School paintings. Acrylic on art posters mounted on wooden panels. These are about my personal fascination with painting—Its history, technique and connection to the Hudson River Valley where I live and work. 

INTERIORS
The title references the body or the head—the porous cage that holds our stuff — experiences, traumas, memories, organs and emotions — that makes us who we are. Completed mostly during the COVID pandemic, these paintings deal with isolation: personal and societal. 

THINGS FALL APART
In this series I wanted to deal with pictorial depth, weight, light and shadow. The subject of nondescript objects or parts of things is a metaphor for impermanence. This conceit lends itself to improvisation, discovery and play. I try to keep the process open and unconscious for as long as possible. Ultimately, the need for pictorial strategies asserts itself and I respond to formal opportunities to construct an image that makes sense to me.

THE GUTENBERG VARIATIONS
Both paintings and books are depositories of ideas. We experience the pages of a book as flat—black ink on white paper—but a book has space in the way a painting has space, through ideas and conventions. The books we read and the paintings we live with, define and reveal us. Just as a book requires the reader to assemble images and ideas out of its signs and symbols, the viewer of a painting is asked to translate brush strokes and paint drips into reason and emotion.