Photos

digital photos

Colored light and shape are what interest me most in these shots. I think they inform my paintings with the way they are focused on simplicity. The triangle is a singular shape appearing to hang in space, although it is light on a wall. My paintings of circles and squares are the same kind of idea. There is a relationship between positive and negative as well. James Turell is a master of the materiality of light. My photos are sketches compared with his symphonies. The first photo is Self-Portrait with Biscuit depicting my beagle puppy. I like the way my shadow snuck in there. In fact, it is much like the shadow of a head my friend observed in Square-spotted Yellow Mark. It reminds me of the domesticity and colored light of Bonnard as well as Bonnard's dashund.

Two Paintings: Green with Yellow Marks, and Ochre and Brown

Ochre and Brown, 12” x 24”, oil on panel, 2007

Green With Yellow Marks, 12” x 24”, oil on panel, 2007


Ochre and Brown is a strange painting for me because it is both subtle and straightforward. It is earthy and feels like a golden, burnt field of Millet and has the brown of a discolored varnished oil from the nineteenth century. The land and sky have an interesting relationship as pieces of ground seem to lose their density and become clouds. It is strange too for its mixture of modernity and history, organic and synthetic.

Green With Yellow Marks reminds me of a field of buttercups or yellow tulips. I’m not a gardener and I welcome and enjoy the site of dandelions covering my lawn in the spring. The stretched horizontal landscape format works well for this pastoral imagery; the yellow marks twinkle like stars.

Square-Spotted Yellow Mark

24" x 24", oil on panel

This painting is a link between my minimalist pieces with squares and circles and the butterfly work. The butterfly is coming out of the void into the green. It is equivalent to coming out from under a rock, as the saying goes. Light and texture play important roles in this one.

My friend, Andrew, had this observation, "The darker green appears to me as the shadow of someone’s head, an unseen observer watching the butterfly emerge from the square. Just thought I’d share that."

Usually when people say they see "things" in my paintings, it is often because they can't see the picture as an abstraction and are trying to latch onto something they can name, like looking for things in clouds. A face is typically the first thing picked out because it comes from a human need to make sense of another human, finding the eyes, nose, and mouth. In this case, Andrew is right on. It is funny when I haven't lived with a piece long enough to realize what I did. The meaning of this shadowy presence is a whole other thing.

A Butterfly in the Hands, Red-bordered Pixie

36" x 24"

oil on panel

The white hands are ghostly, holding the butterfly as if forming it. It is an allegory for a divine creator. It is also an individual accepting mortality and making some attempt at grasping life anyway.

The picture is simultaneously stark and atmospheric. There is a range of delicate linear elements, short brushstrokes, blurred and loosely painted areas, and bold shapes. It feels eternal and instantaneous, tangible and ephemeral.

Painting is different than music in that it is not linear in time. Painting is not bound by a start and a finish in terms of how it is seen by the viewer. This painting is in tune with its medium and the way time functions in visual art.