Artist Statement
I’m glad to share my paintings with you and I hope they give you some pleasure; that’s what I get from them. I enjoy the visual treats I find on the canvas, the illusion, the color and the expressive nature of marks on a surface. Painting landscape, still life or the figure requires observation at a level I wouldn’t use otherwise and I always discover surprising things when I look to paint.
Painting improvisationally gives me a chance to play, to test myself to find creative solutions to problems that come up in the painting.
Recently I’ve combined representational images with the improvisational process to see what might happen. My process technique, the device that moves the painting along, is to layer pattern and color. The patterns are made of simple shapes I draw, like a tube-shape, a c-shape or a fish-shape. I scatter the shapes across the surface and apply color to the outside of the shapes. I repeat the layers until the surface develops visual events, interesting relationships that might suggest a direction to take the painting. In the recent paintings I use that process organized into representational images. Old family photos are wonderful, vivid views frozen into place, sunlight, shadow, time of day. Most of the people in the photos took the one or two seconds to look directly at the camera, the viewer. Though the compositions can be odd with people cropped at the knees or the forehead, etc., some of the photos are artful. I am grateful to my Uncle George for his picture taking skills. I used many of his shots for my paintings.
I thought the venture might be a competition for dominance between the fixed image and the abstract course of improvisation. What I expect a painting to do almost never turns out to be what actually happens. I found that the patterns add an expressive quality to the representational image like thick brushstrokes do in other paintings. The patterns also allow a view of the history of construction of the painting since the color is applied to the outside of the pattern characters. Inside the pattern characters, the accumulations of different layers can be seen. One of my first fascinations with paintings came with close examination of how the illusion was constructed. A painting viewed at a distance shows the illusion, the apple, the boat or the
person. Up close the painting reveals the individual brushstrokes that build the illusion.
Painting improvisationally gives me a chance to play, to test myself to find creative solutions to problems that come up in the painting.
Recently I’ve combined representational images with the improvisational process to see what might happen. My process technique, the device that moves the painting along, is to layer pattern and color. The patterns are made of simple shapes I draw, like a tube-shape, a c-shape or a fish-shape. I scatter the shapes across the surface and apply color to the outside of the shapes. I repeat the layers until the surface develops visual events, interesting relationships that might suggest a direction to take the painting. In the recent paintings I use that process organized into representational images. Old family photos are wonderful, vivid views frozen into place, sunlight, shadow, time of day. Most of the people in the photos took the one or two seconds to look directly at the camera, the viewer. Though the compositions can be odd with people cropped at the knees or the forehead, etc., some of the photos are artful. I am grateful to my Uncle George for his picture taking skills. I used many of his shots for my paintings.
I thought the venture might be a competition for dominance between the fixed image and the abstract course of improvisation. What I expect a painting to do almost never turns out to be what actually happens. I found that the patterns add an expressive quality to the representational image like thick brushstrokes do in other paintings. The patterns also allow a view of the history of construction of the painting since the color is applied to the outside of the pattern characters. Inside the pattern characters, the accumulations of different layers can be seen. One of my first fascinations with paintings came with close examination of how the illusion was constructed. A painting viewed at a distance shows the illusion, the apple, the boat or the
person. Up close the painting reveals the individual brushstrokes that build the illusion.
