April 2023

Artist Statement for exhibition with Shared Habitat Earth (S.H.E.):

My paintings are (nearly always) in conversation with Nature and are set in a landscape-adjacent space.

To participate in the endless cycle of modulated emotional choices -- the struggle of negativity and hope, and the turning of this crazy world of ours -- is inescapable; but in my work, optimism invariably wins and the vision of a better, artist created world prevails.

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November 2022

My work is expansive, not reductive -- even when minimalist. 

Emotions are tangled in surface textures, in the undeniable impression of depth, of breadth -- of quiet or potent space. 

Color is my guiding star 🌟. 

These paintings are a temporal journey from emotion to emotion, saturated with color. 

 

August 2020

Kandinsky defined understanding in art as the "Heranbildung des Zuschauers auf den Standpunkt des Künstlers" (education of the viewer to reach the standpoint of the artist)...

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April 2017

There are many kinds of abstraction, all expressive in their own way.

Decades pass, standards of beauty change in the eyes of the beholder – but the wily abstraction, now 100 years young, keeps reinventing itself.

Colors whisper, sing, exclaim, entice, convince, and transport. Textures rise and smooth away; the light, pulsing, reflects or is absorbed. The eye sees movement where there is none. The balance is upset, regained, remixed in the layers of paint, along their edges and boundaries. Dualities are alluded to and set aside; every dot, line, squiggle, and interval counts.

What makes every human invention a part of Nature?.. – it’s the capacity to perceive simplicity and complexity at the same time -- part of our ability to hold on to several contradictory views simultaneously. Abstraction would not exist without these seeming contradictions and the liberating capacity of our minds ever to renew themselves.

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July 2015

The sound of color, the music of movement -- this is the spacetime continuum of my painting.

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April 2012

About mistrusting words to describe a visual art... here's a timely note of caution from Elliot Ross, photographer: "...I think I was trying to avoid the phenomenon known as verbal overshadowing in which the left hemisphere of the brain, which thinks in words, displaces the product of the right hemisphere, which thinks in pictures -- the description that kills the image."

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January 2011

So often an artist searches for a kind of perfection for their work. Will they also hear this Zen quatrain from our songmaster Leonard Cohen ("Anthem"): 

"Ring the bells that still can ring! 

Forget your perfect offering. 

There is a crack in everything -- 

that's how the light gets in!"

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April 2008 

How notable in the art of the past century a periodic revival of interest in "spiritual art". What Rothko tried to do through feeling -- to move the soul with color -- many Minimalists attempted to do through silence. (Minimalism = the art of the interval.) I am thinking of Agnes Martin: her enigmatically enveloping paintings; her magically spare writings.

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May 2005 

I greatly admire the high achievements of Abstract Expressionists and of Minimal Art. However, one would look to their roots in Kandinsky and in Chinese Art to find more direct antecedents to my painting.

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January 2002 

Frowned upon for most of the 20th century, it is now an open secret: many artists paint in more than one style at the same time! I have decided to designate different strands of my own work as "minimal" and "baroque". 

Where a tempted reader might take this terminological wordplay too literally, a post-modern viewer will see through it to a lyric poeticism of times past -- a remnant symbol amidst a metaphor, tucked inside the enigma of art historical notations that pass for our common cultural heritage. 

To put it more "minimally", these distinctions (along with the titles of my paintings) are best viewed with a lyric eye of a poet.

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February 1998 

It is high time we reconsider Kandinsky -- and not just for the pre-eminence in his painting of color - a trans-stylistic element of major lasting importance. 

It is the fresh relevance of meditational space, of the updating of the illusion of spatial warp and woof, and the continued attempts at incorporating geometric figures as a vehicle to impose pictorial order, that have emerged again as the pivotal painting issues. 

My paintings are informed by all of these preoccupations as well as textural concerns, in a continuity of spatial representation interests that hearken back to the classic art of the Far East, and thence forward to the contemporary work of Brice Marden and Joan Snyder.

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November 1995 

I am interested in the “mood setting”, emotional effects of color. To that effect, I utilize shape, line, and texture in an arrangement that comes in a series of unpremeditated, interactive flows, alternating with periods of reflection and a kind of meditation, all aided and abetted by music -- another great mood setter. 

It is a process that involves time and rewards prolonged acquaintance (richly, I hope). Particularly, since the works are done in a “major key” and can, as one of their complex messages, lead to an emotion of joy. 

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