The White House and House with Black Roof

oil on panel

36" x 24"
PRIVATE COLLECTION

ceramic relief

6" x 4 1/2"

The ceramic relief was done after the painting. Circles are made by pressing the end of a tool into the clay; some look convex but they are all concave. They define planes but also float.

There are trails leading your eye around, dictating a specific speed, tempo, like most painters do. The book Cezanne's Composition maps the directions Cezanne takes the viewer, like arrows painted on the floor for learning dance steps. Cezanne is often somber, intense and a lower key than Van Gogh. The Plain White T's have a song I like similar to this mood, Write You a Song. "I will write you a song; that's how you know our love is still strong." I've said it before - I'm a romantic.

In my mind my painting and relief aren't just depictions of houses but are about making a home with someone. Crosby Stills and Nash's Our House and Billy Joel's You're My Home does it for me as does the new kids movie Up. The part of the story that takes Up beyond the pat endings of many animations is the relationship of the elderly man and his wife. He has a loyalty to his house because of his memories of her together with him in it. He has a very hard time letting go, to say the least. A house is a house. A home is the love inside. Pass the tissues.

For Christoph who wrote "I love Nicole" in sharpie on my arm.

Lake Ontario

15" x 18"

oil on canvas

Here is Lake Ontario, twenty minutes from my house outside of Rochester. Bracketed by black edges, it reminds me of a Kodak (Rochester's own) slide, now obsolete. The suggestion is a section of a larger whole. It is easy to get lost in Lake Ontario, at least visually. It is large enough to seem like an ocean, although a placid one. Stripes go beyond graphic flatness to simultaneously convey density and luminosity.

The graphic underpinnings of the picture remind me of the Op-Art Movement I learned about in art school. Op-Art focused on optical phenomena inspired by nature. Viewers are made aware of the process of looking, the way the eye functions. Op-Artist Bridget Riley's stripe paintings concern themselves with bands of color, placement, width, and the creation of light. They differ from my work in that my paintings have more organic qualities, changing texture, and a more overt reference to nature (Riley was also influenced by landscape), and sense of weight. Painter Ross Bleckner knew Riley. I like his work very much. He paints fields of compartmentalized organic forms. Newer circle paintings related to bubbles, the natural world, and Christmas ornaments (like some of my paintings, funny). He plays with the focus of forms as if adjusting a lens or microscope.

In reflecting on what makes my painting different from the actual lake as well as these aforementioned painters, is it is a bit anthropomorphous. All painting transmits the thoughts and feelings (or lack thereof) of the painter rather than just the subject. Lake Ontario feels sure of itself and its identity, both bold and fluid.

Spring #12 Green Violet Grid and Red Window Sill

oil on canvas

Number twelve is a square divided by six.  Two trees make a diagonal; the center two colors are lighter than the rest.  There are subtle textures between the sections.

Some people prefer directly observed landscapes/pictures compared to invented and vice versa, but both are informed by everything I see and have seen.

The Red Window Sill makes me thing of the game Mastermind which I recently played with my son now that summer vacation is in full swing.  The black, white, blue, green, red in the painting are like a row of the colored pieces but are specific hues rather than generic unmixed primaries.  Both paintings have this quality.

American painter Ellsworth Kelly is known for his color sensibility. At first I had a difficult time appreciating his shaped canvases painted with only one color.  Now I see the elegant beauty of his decisions.  He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery which is a large enough space to show his large paintings, 80" x 77" for example.  In Painting for a White Wall Kelly tries to further control the viewing experience of his piece by strongly advising the background for his work by including it in the title.  A different colored wall would completely alter the color situation he has established.

  Contemporary curators experiment with wall colors.  Several years back the MFA Boston showed Sargent's The Daughters of Edward D. Boit on a maroon wall.  Red being the complement of green, the green-blacks in the painting came out.  How Sargent may feel about this is questionable, but it did achieve a fresh view of the picture long on view in the permanent collection.  Electric lights, print media, television and computers completely changed the way artists perceive color. In addition, images can be tweaked photo editing software with the slide of a bar.  It is very different than a painter deliberately choosing the light, color, and focus for a painting.  These issues for colorists are my own and my thoughts on them pervade everything I do including playing ancient board games.

Ceramics!

Hill, Dark Trees

Winter to Spring Window

Tilting Field

all approximately 5" x 7"

The kiln works!!!!!!  I got a used kiln and a dream come true in one.  I mainly want to make landscape reliefs. I don't know if I'll make vessels, maybe hand-built incorporating relief.  These can be hung on the wall by an indentation in the back.  I love that these landscapes are made from earth, clay.  The layers of the land, its undulations; the space between expanses of field, woods, hill, and sky are the subject.  Here in the country these areas, their textures, color and expanse fill my eyeballs.  We are fortunate to have the undeveloped lot across the street and we don't feel hemmed in.   I love moving the clay, forming vision into something I can handle, like building with hammers, nails, and wood.  In addition to form there is the stretching of the ground and the sky that is over and around.   Making this experience into a solid is challenging and fascinating.  

Greek bas reliefs are narratives telling history and myth pulled out of marble with the perfection of structure embodied in that culture's architecture.  I admire them greatly, but am not interested in pursuing their figuration and Platonic purity of the ideal.  My things are crude, reflective of the mud they are made from and the mud they represent.  Beautiful in the organic qualities like the range of compost to thriving plants.  They have the cultural context of a Bostonian relocating and embracing the middle of nowhere.  Local doesn't have to mean provincial.   I am just beginning.