Butterfly Box, Below

oil on panel, 28" x 24"

This picture aims at capturing the flutter. The assymetry, open form, atmospheric space with linear moments for definition all aid in the effect. The wings feel like the delicate membranes that they are. Hints at an open box at the bottom give a reference point to create a sense of space as the butterfly lifts upward.

Butterfly Hand (v.2), Pink

36" x24", oil on panel

I just finished reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. It was voted one of the top one hundred books of the century by the New York Public Library, and it is now one of my favorites. In the back of the novel is a quote by Smith, "I came to a clear conclusion, and it is a universal one: to live, to struggle, to be in love with life - in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful - is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us."

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion remarks about the way our culture doesn't encourage one to pause very long to mourn. Descendants from hearty pioneers and immigrants who don't look back, we are supposed to dust ourselves off and keep going. This instinct for self-preservation is important, but we can also lose ourselves if we get caught up in a whirlwind of busyness and distractions. There is a reason why religious people often seek solitude.

What I like about Smith's statement is that it is parallels the idea that everything has its time, but it goes further to say that it is better to experience all things than to be numb. It also reminds us that we should expect imperfection and change. We should not feel cheated because our lives do not mirror ads picturing happy people and their new car or trip to the Bahamas.

What does this all have to do with art? Everything. I use my art as a way to contemplate and express life's experiences, not to make mirages that a viewer might find easier to see. People who are engaged in life in a similar way might want to look here at my attempts to grasp what cannot be grasped. It is no wonder that walking into the studio is still daunting.

Cloud

24" x 24", oil on panel

This is a slice of sky, a window in a void, a look into blue sky from outer space. The sky is tranquil, cheerful, yet singular, solitary inside the larger black square.

I think it would be too simplistic to reduce this to a matter of pure optimism versus pessimism. Isolated and out of context, the relationship the cloud has to anything else is unknowable. A transitory part of a weather system, floating over a particular country, we see it here as a Platonic form. Rather than pessimistic, the void may be the unknown, not necessarily anything sinister. Maybe the ideal is unreachable, or maybe the cloud is a snapshot of something at its best. The painting is something about time and the human condition; the present is visible while the future stays persistently out of sight.

Female Loss

24" x 24", oil on panel

I shot this in natural daylight, but there still was a glare; I find this difficult to avoid when photographing thickly painted, dark images. The vigorous texture is visible, though.

Description: a small, pink, central circle is inside a black square, inside a dark brown/plum square. The black is vacuous, but the warmth of the pink and plum relate, creating a spatial tension between depth and surface.

There is something ocular about these circles I am doing. They seem monocular, like the view through a telescope, also planetary despite their apparent flatness. I am fascinated, as are many, with the luminous spheres that hang in space, particularly the moon. It is full of dichotomies, near and far, familiar and mysterious, deceptively simple.