The general misunderstanding of a painting is due to missing it's spiritual and technical qualities. If the observer's eye is not trained to equate formal visual problems with those things, he/she will search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a painting, looking for representational things instead of music-like relationships. My paintings are about the structural spaces that make up volumetric composition through the relationship of colors.
My paintings 'sing' through the light that emanates from the seasonal color combinations that occur in landscape. How does the color define a particular place through the act of painting itself? The viewer is invited to enter through the architectural construction of my drawings or paintings, and be moved by it.
Each of my paintings represents a crystallized chunk of formal experience, while being very personal at the same time. My paintings are earthy, rock-like and weighty, and yet they have in them the rhythm of the sea. I am a nature painter; the nature "out there" coupled with my own internal landscape. My inner finds the equivalent 'out there.'
My abstract paintings hold in them emotion, spirit, soul, and memory, all of which rise up in a form conducive to be realized in oil paint. The paint finds them before even I do. How colors relate is everything: the color finds the light, creates the shape. A process/improvisational painter, I listen to how the paint wants to move, every new painterly decision responding to what came before, (searching for compositions through rhythms, harmonies, synchronizations and counterpoints). My paintings become windows peering into space beyond their four edges. I feel like I am at a construction site breathing life onto the canvas through a simultaneous building up and a tearing down of color. What is the distance between the forms, how do I get the space between them to move? The intervals are found through a process of elimination: I get rid of what does not enhance the whole, and add what does. How can I say 'the thing' in the most economical way?
A painting gets born when it has a specific presence that comes alive in it. It comes together only at the very end through the last accouterments that come along so naturally and pleasurably, to fine-tune all that is already rhythmically tied. How I place shapes together becomes the structure in both the paintings and the drawings: '(where' they exist in space in relationship to each other). The dialog between ideas lives in me like a fascinating story I'm telling. Invention surges up and I paint out of curiosity: a problem area in the painting becomes a foreign country in which to travel. I continue to strengthen the major concept as it is in the process of becoming "whole." I can never quite get there, but I get closer as I develop my skill, over time. A familiar shape worked out in the last painting gets obliterated in the new one, for it cannot have a name that has already been spoken. Just as an improvisational musician finds his "lines," I enjoy the struggle inside the search.
My painting process is unsettling, passionate, radical, and driven. All together, a body of paintings becomes like the movements of a symphony that take a year or more to fully realize. Each painting has immediacy to it, but takes time to complete; it's my own personal paradox. The painting is the consequence of technique and skill brought about by the concept. That is how what ends up on my canvas gets said, and how my paintings come to
