Bio/Process

I was a curious child, interested in dinosaurs, bugs and art. A boy scout, I camped, hiked, canoed, white water rafted, learned first aid. My interests expanded and include art & science, business & politics, religion & philosophy, and family & friends. My curiousity and creativity persists: I need to paint, to write, to learn, to explore, to relate.

 

That said, along the way I acquired responsibilities and made tradeoffs between family, children, friends, work, health, curiosity, learning, art, science. Of course, difficult tradeoffs continue forever. They are not always welcome; but they bring essential vitality, new experience and relationships to life.

 

In late 2014, I refocused my curiosity and creativity upon painting. My primary goal is to paint, exhibit, and sell significant portraits of persons and ideas each year. To achieve that, I’ve reshaped my tradeoffs around my artistic work. My first 2 imperfect studios (basement in Maine and garage in Arizona) were sufficient to test my commitment to my artistic process and the resilience of imagination. I am satisfied, focused and will persevere as artist.

 

Since June 2016, I have had a permanent studio in Tempe, AZ; where I can work on paintings simultaneously in different stages. I move from one painting to another allowing paint to dry, ideas to percolate. Sometimes I focus only on one painting. Always I do necessary research for a current or future painting. My actions and aesthetic decisions are in part conscious; but more importantly unconscious, that is where judgement resides. Each of my painting, including paint time and research, takes as long as it takes until it is finished. And then  sometimes, I decide to modify it later. (In March 2020, I stopped my work. We decided to move to Bangor, Maine. My new studio is almost ready August 2020. As well Covidvirus has changed much. We are healthy.)

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I listen to my aesthetic instinct, which may insist on erasing or replacing this image/word or that; this lighting, color or detail or that; or completely painting over entire painting with new structure, image, color or words. Seldom is the problem, my imperfect technique. More often the problem is gratuitous junk and cliché that needs to be painted over. The fear I must ignore, is that I may ruin my nearly complete painting by over painting. Yes, my aesthetic understanding demands that I destroy and repaint until I am satisfied. That is not perfectionism, that is listening, observing, exploring.  Chimera Cyborg dreams redacted is such a painting.  As you can see, the entire original painting was redacted with small blue rectangles; and then seriously redacted with larger rectangles of color appropriated from Mondrian. The idea for this painting changed from himera Cyborg to include dreams redacted which made my chimera cyborg human. Which we cyborgs are.

 

Over the decades, my creative energy, imagination and artistic experiments has remained strong. What has changed is that I am focusing my creative energies on painting. Of course life and creativity continually assert themselves into my art in ways that I must be listen to and focus upon. Thus I create while appropriating images, words, ideas, events, art-isms and whatsuch from our world culture. Yet my art is original to the core; because from the many images and words that I appropriate in my research, only the few remain which are not gratuitous to the aesthetic idea that I wish to portray. And  little or big, each appropriation is an essential to the whole portrait I am trying to create.