Light Aspects

“ATMOSPHERIC COLOR STUDIES” addresses formal aspects of large format painting. Research done on location specific to longitude/ latitude markings showcase the ordinary to the extraordinary. They are aesthetic visual weights, atmospheric balances between harmony and content, addressing energy and tension of natural color. The color of heat, dampness, and cold all play an important role in my work.

Images 1 through 6:
”Light Aspects Florence”
5.5 feet wide by 6.5 feet wide
oil on linen

Images 7 through 11:
”Light Aspects Venice”
5.5 feet wide by 6.5 feet wide
oil on linen

Atmospheric Studies

Pure Hope

Gamboge. Orpiment. Imperial Yellow.Lead-tin Yellow. Indian Yellow. Naples Yellow. Chrome Yellow. Gold. Transparent Yellow. Permanent Yellow. Alizarin Yellow.

“Eternal insignificance of yellow-backed pamphleteering”, Edgar Allen Poe. “Still Life With Bible”, Vincent Van Gogh.

“The Bloom In Yellow”, Richard Le Gallienne.

“The Yellow Book” The scandalous, avant-garde periodical, 1894.

Mark Making

All drawings are created on archival acid free lithograph paper in graphite. Some incorporate paint, gold leaf and automotive spray paint. Images are drawn from still life set-ups, digital documentation, research notes, and object appropriation.

“Zena’s Song”
”History of Clean Water”
”H2o, Commodity or Human Right”
”Art of Negotiation”
”Life of an Adjunct”
”Encantada”
”Just Ducky”
”Pontificating About Nothing”
”Pony Boy”
”Transmission”
”Craft”
”Water Song”
”Still Life With Gloves”
”Tom”
”WMD’s”
”Clean Air, Commodity or Human Right”
”Lies, Falsehoods, Contradictions”

"Javier"

Glue

Isle Royale

Several of the images I am including represent my fascination with
hybrid additions to the work. *“Italian Midnight Green”, “Tuscan Smoke Lavender”, “Greve Sage”, and “Isle Royale Blue” incorporate multi paneled pieces created from a variety of ordinary, even banal, materials like wood, pcv pipes, plastic garbage, glue, paint, gold leaf, chalk board, trinkets, trash and, most importantly, discarded plastic toys. The cluttered, overdone look intentionally references the exaggerated tension, exuberance and grandeur of Baroque art. Many of the finishes are done in faux-gold-leaf. I hope that they evoke ancient religious ornaments, cosmic harmony and a balance between heaven and earth.

Mind Games

On Star: Berlin

“ONSTAR: BERLIN” is mixed media: oil paint, graphite, digital image and appropriated antiques. The palette is both saturated and not. All panels are fabricated in a modular format around the formal, non-personal structure of an underlying grid system is based on the Golden Mean. They vary in dimension but stay within scale of each other. They hang not on a common height-line, but on a single, contextual eye-level-horizon. Images now include the larger than life face, the target bulls eye, the breast fed demon-eyed infant, the digital finger print, the antique plumb-line (actual object), the digital white rose, the North Bellaire Palace Museum in Vienna (visited during a 150 mile an hour wind storm), and digital graffiti borrowed from what is left standing of the Berlin Wall.

Cartesian Architect: Sienna

“SIENNA: THE CARTESIAN ARCHITECT” is a series of paintings, drawings and chalkboards created to hang within a panoptic configuration with a center point of approximately 45 inches off the ground. This configuration places the viewer in the center and addresses not only the power of image as sign but the power of space, environment and enclosure. “Architect” preserves snippets of claustrophobic city constructs with center plazas (the happy, the sad, the sick, residents and vacationers, the young and the senior citizen) in paint. The direction of each gaze and the tight crop of each independent composition are sandwiched between chalkboards on Cartesian measures, panoptic architecture, academic notes on the five levels of paranoia and hypnotic optic images. Architect marks a clear transition in the work; no longer wall based modular but manufactured spaces, enclosures and environments. My goal is to create a series of spaces, environments, enclosures that reference contemporary human emotion (fear, ownership, imagination, the apocalypse, hacker space).

Ambivalence

“AMBIVALENCE” It’s impetus is the observation of an elementary class viewing art while visiting the Brussels Museum of Fine Art. The class and its instructors/chaperones are silently listening to a gallery docent discuss a painting based on The Rape of the Sabine Woman, a subject matter that has been the focus of numerous famous pieces of art throughout Western art history. The palette of “Ambivalence” is Baroque, painted in 20th c. American muscular brush stroke. The compositional tool is digital and I am the director.

One Thousand Missed Dialogues

“1000 MISSED DIALOGUES” is a 50 foot long painting of strangers, video cameras, art monographs, art history texts, art theory essays, and falling flowers. Contextually, the viewer immediately deduces the “scheme” or model of 1000 to be merely a series of larger than life portraits. Upon closer observation, a visual transition takes place: the viewer — standing, observing, staring back at the painting — moving the eye across the surface possibly in a non-linear manner — literally becomes the primary content of the piece.