Movement and fluidity is an element in all of my paintings, drawings and prints. It is also the very nature of water itself. Can I capture the sense of movement? Living on Cape Cod so close to water I frequently visit and explore the beach. The experience is always refreshingly unique. I always see something new that leads me towards introspection. The correlations of nature and life itself can be overwhelming. I am always intrigued by currents of water that leave their traces in the sand. But it is temporary and transient and will be swept away and lost in the next tide. Like life itself, we move from one place to another leaving a trace only to be retained as a memory, because time itself has swept it away.As a gallery artist with the AMZehnder Gallery in Wellfleet the series has continued with a body of experimental painting on metal using encaustic, cold wax and mixed media.

FROM A MOVING CAR: Drawings

I started to draw from a moving car a number of years ago. As a passenger, highway images fly by at breakneck speed. I draw in a frenzy trying to catch a glimpse of something that has already passed my vision. A truck becomes a lamp post or a billboard becomes a tree, etc. It’s an enjoyable game of juxtaposing images on top of one another and discovering a different dimension. I have come to love the immediacy of line and gesture and the approach has significantly spilled into my paintings and prints as well.

FROM A MOVING CAR: Prints

I drew the same as before. Instead of paper, I used laser plates that are lithography plates that are thin enough to be fed into a printer. I used to work in traditional stone lithography. But these plates are portable and can be printed with my etching press. The ball point pen or permanent markers deposited grease onto this water-loving litho -plate. I simply took the plates back to my studio and printed using the lithographic process. People ask me why I work this way. But the advantage is that the lithography plate provides a matrix that can be used in countless ways. I can also print a lithograph in any color and am not limited to black. Experimentation is my delight. In these prints, I combined lithography with the monotype process. The linear part of the image is the lithograph while the colored areas of the print is a monotype. Hence it is called a litho-monoprint. Because of the varied use of color, these are variable editions, (VE). Can you find another print with the same matrix?

DRAWING NATURE: Florida

In Florida, I was inspired by palm trees and their movement in the wind. The series is called, “Palms in the Wind”. It was an obsession to try to capture the point of crescendo and stasis like music in nature. This is only one of many that reached the dimensions of 6 feet. Some were part of a solo show at Cotuit Center of the Arts. And three were in an invitational at the Duxbury Art Complex and featured in an article by Robert Knox in the Boston Globe.

DRAWING NATURE: Cape Cod

I had a different response to wind than I did in Florida. Here, the wind seems to pull the branches away from one another and then the next minute, it pulls everything together in-mass reminiscent of the "push-pull" phenomena in abstract expressionism. There is also the wonderful patterning of the air and its engagement with the solidity of the branches. The first four images were sold in the solo exhibition at High Field Hall in Falmouth. Following that exhibition, the nature drawings experimented with asphaltum and graphite on vellum as well as the more introspective view of nature in a more vulnerable state.

PAINTING LAND

Painting is direct and fluid. I work in acrylics as well as oils . But I am always curious to see how colors react and, like a child, I respond with the immediate contact of paint with surface. I want my paintings to exude a life of their own. Some were painted directly from observation and some from my photos taken as references. Experimentation is the foundation for much of my art and exploring unusual strata for paintings is part of that exploration. In the first four images below, I used acrylic paint on Canson Vidalon paper. The smooth surface of the paper and the fluidity of the paint seemed to correspond to the moment and its immediate reaction. The first image was donated at Susie Nielsen’s gallery for Aid To Ukraine. The next two are in the Arts Foundation upcoming silent auction. SEE THE EXHIBITION AND BLOG section of this website. The last one is in the private collection of Bert Yarborough. The last three images are in oil paint on canvas or panels. The immediacy has more to do with the feelings I have at that moment.

ABSTRACTIONS

Abstractions span the whole of life experiences and expressions and can encompass a wealth of materials and techniques. They connect with ourselves and others. What we see and experience in our daily life may seem insignificant at first. But through the creative process itself, the image starts to slowly emerge somewhere from inside. The experience and memory has just been resting in a subliminal state and just waiting to assert itself. That’s how all my abstractions come about. This image, “Labyrinthine” came out of an experience I had as I walked along a roadside and saw an unusual thicket of vines. You could enter it and get lost, I thought. Then I went home and later in the day, started printing and somehow the experience kept asserting itself. Rather spooky I think, but none the less significant. Because we are actually talking about the universal language that abstractions have. This piece was accepted in the Southcoast New England Printmaking catalog exhibition at the college of Visual and Performing Arts Gallery of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA. a long time ago, but it still resonates.