My most productive period is between April and November when weather conditions in the northeastern U.S. are generally favorable for working outdoors. It provides me with an unrestrained freedom and inspiration from being engulfed by the lush beauty of a natural habitat ...
Last year, 2009, was particularly fruitful - having completed numerous large-scale commissions and ancillary projects that advanced my commitment and contribution to contemporary abstract painting ...
November usually begins a period of critical evaluation, analysis, and cataloging notes from the previous painting season. As the cycle of development spirals onward through life and career, aspects of progress and irrelevancies become apparent ...
With the intensity and regularity of last year’s production, aspects of my approach to painting became more clarified. I have an increased interest in:
- veiling and glazing to achieve an amorphous environment of dynamic energy ...
- simultaneous events and intermingled circumstance ...
- depicting the essential components of nature ...
- creativity, thought, and nature: the process of creation, evolution, cause and consequence ...
- the initial impulse or synapse that propels an event ...
- the relationships our species develops with the ever-changing scope and sequence of nature’s reality ...
Though these considerations have always been a vital part of my expression, lately, I’m articulating the visual dialect more accurrately and gaining mastery over techniques that facilitate the eloquence required to convey conceptual content ...
Three developments can be sited as pivotal turning points along this progression:
- Views Of A Secret, a series of multi-layered translucent vellum ink drawings ...
- Placid Blues, a large-scale study of water; its’ rhythms, reflections, and transparent depths ...
- Flora, a large-scale landscape motif painted during seasonal changes over a seven month period ...
With all three projects, I was intently concerned about preserving the initial drawings, impulse, inspiration, and rhythms while adding the complexities of the concept’s morphology through development ...
Over the past thirty years, i’ve grappled with paradox - being simultaneously interested in maintaining continuity between the simplicity of essential ‘spirit’ in a thought or place while depicting more complex configurations through maturation ...
Logos began in January, at the height of research and evaluation, during a period of blizzard conditions; a time when the landscape is minimized by the neutrality of snow ...
Typically, an expressionistic drawing is applied to the blank surface as a method of imbuing the painting with the impulse of the idea while familiarizing myself with the physicality of the piece ...
In this case, I went through numerous stages of this process while glazing over previous drawings resulting in a complex network of lines and gestures that maintained the original ‘spirit’ of the piece and essence of the snow covered environment ...
Reduction to bare essentials allows discrimination toward additives - the nature of air, water, earth, flora ...
This approach rekindled my interest in the ancient ideas of logos - the spirit of place and genius loci, Aristotle, Philo, and Heraclitus, reason, and the principles of order amid the apparent chaos of nature ...
I began thinking about the notions of painting again; the wealth of information in its’ history, the Impressionist concept of painting light, the Abstract Expressionist attempt at harnessing energy and thought, Post Modern entropy, and the importance of landscape throughout ...
Logos is representative of more than a decade of living in a rural environment, participating in nature’s daily and seasonal changes while studying, painting, and learning in relative seclusion ...
