Paintings
Paintings
Before art became my life, I had the pleasure of teaching Marine Science to teenagers in the Florida Keys. Daily snorkeling imprinted me with its magic effervescence. This turgid, flowing metaphor animates my paintings today.
Fascination with the human figure taught me how to paint. Entering into this interactive, visual dialogue is for me like being propelled into the stars. As I probe the watery flicker of human emotion with layers of transparent glazes, I have no idea where I will end up. I do know that this is a divine investigative communion with the emotional and physical energy of another.
My work process is direct. I make no preliminary sketches or drawings for the painting. Once I am comfortable with the idea before me, I begin layering colors, mixing as I go: glazing to produce a translucent depth of interplay between line & color. The transparency and layers of colors are integral to my thematic focus of permeability: the figure and its grounding atmosphere (which includes me and my interactive perceptions) are one and the same. I situate my idea, select color and light, and go. They grow and argue. I delete, add, and go to a place of which I have no prescience.
I rely on reverie, dreams, visions to light and fuse my path forward.
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When water imagery began accompanying my figurative paintings, it became obvious to me that this subconscious bubbling up percolated from my long search for the divine feminine in theological, archeological, and mythological studies. Springs have long been sites for worship where the healing and nourishing waters have for centuries bestowed mercy, forgiveness and clarity.
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By viewing this miraculous liquid as the feminine spirit of continual regenerative change, I found an ecological ally divergent from the predominantly controlling "Yang" culture as I was experiencing it.
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Because I feel that divinity in human experience is an action based activity, I am now drawn to those lives who are compelled by an inner and outer calling to speak truth to resistance and denial. This mysterious inner dialogue that moves one person to take that fateful step forward into the gladiator’s arena is that glowing ember of human initiative that captures what is sacred, I think. I am able to extract from photos the images I need. What transpires is a fusion of my own experience with theirs.
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There is nothing more radical than speaking truth to power.
It opens the stage for smearing criticism, defamation of character, perpetration of lies and ridicule, and social isolation that can derail a life for its duration.
Confronting entrenched beliefs and protocols is like boarding a locomotive with no brakes. Yet, like a painting that knows not its destiny, these performances in paint bear witness to truth against all cost.
Water Media Paintings
Most of these paintings grow from Ink Figure studies that beckon me to
invest more. They have evolved into paintings through use of ink, gouache
and watercolor.
They reveal transparency and emotion like no other media. Ink drawings
are the most honest of techniques because they demand an accurate and
confident line which cannot be erased- there's no fixing an ink line. They
also provide the drama of bleeding color, space and place.
Drawings and Water Media Paintings are an economical way to own
original art work. Their time commitment is much less than paintings and
sculpture which demand deeper and broader skill sets.
Low cost high quality reproduction prints are also available for all of these
works.
Drawings
Drawing vies to be the most honest of art forms. It shows the confidence of
the artist and the vulnerability of the observed. I love taking in the drawings
of other artists. It’s a line of communication that reveals a naked truth
without the ballast of other materials or distractions. Drawing’s visual
training and execution is as intense as athletic contest. It teaches us to see
as nothing else can.
Drawings in their simplicity and transparency are so provocative of the
complex human energetic mystery, that they command their own
elegance: equal to or even superior to more complex paintings or
sculptures.
The drawing process is the teacher underlying my oeuvre of Sculpture and
Painting. The line describes and elucidates shape to inform the direction of
my brush stroke and the arc of my chisel. My drawings are a continuum
from fast gesture studies, to the slow, sensitive, contour line that penetrates
the soul of artist and model. More complex studies encompass space and
light. My focus is to isolate a small portion of what avails itself to me
through the mysteriously animating choice of moving my pen to paper.
Many of my drawings are figurative. Nothing transmits emotional and
spiritual energy like the living. The interplay between artist and model is an
intense, yet silent, dialogue. Life forces, both wan to wild penetrate this
transparent boundary. Amazingly, the work somehow transmits whatever
mystery the artist records. Seen in this way, they are not portraits so much
as they are conduits of prelingual truths. This is something I can neither
force nor predict. They are an attempt to harness this interactive
communion by using the human figure as a springboard.
Unguarded gentleness, fear, resilience, magnetism: all these emotions defy
description yet are immediately recognizable, fascinate me and propel the
work. What surfaces is always a surprise.