I've had a lifelong compulsion to render through my hands those things that held my fascination. And many things held my fascination. Likewise, I explored many different avenues of media and techniques. Read more
Oil on canvas, November 2022 to September 2023
The Emergence series of paintings has a parallel in the global reckoning and moving on from the pandemic. Yet, the theme is universal and we all at times have to face the aftermath of traumatic events, both social and personal. There is a moment when we dare to come out from shelter and assess if danger has passed, and decide how to restart, how to create a new world.
The figurative aspect is central to the theme — not in the artistic pretense of nudity, but as the reality of nakedness. When the familiar order is stripped away, there is only the self left to emerge.
Oil on canvas, 10x10, October 2021 to June 2022
This series of 21 oil paintings directs attention to those familiar body places that, by their familiarity, oftentimes escape a closer look. The intense beauty of each area demands exclusive inspection, each in its own right. But the overwhelming visual magnetism of faces and the holistic beauty of the entire body rarely provides pause for the individual places.
The compositions live in squares, which are by their nature, dictatorial in their rigidness. Juxtaposed against that are the organic human forms that are at once graphic, monolithic, and yet loaded with stored energy, much like a spring ready to release. These are not images of repose. They are charged and nearly olympian in their proportion. And yet, these are not idealizations, but real, living bodies in the height of their being, known by each of us from within.
As the body places are real, the places that they inhabit are of a more spiritual realm defined only by a horizon that adds weight and gravity to the muscles that resist it. And above the horizons are the complex radiations of that internal energy that is sensed but missed by the eyes.
Each body place is replicated in sets of three to go beyond the expected bifurcation of our form into its familiar pairs. Again, this is to counteract the expected. This is not an exercise in anatomical exposition although that is inseparable from the subject itself, but the focus is the ineffable humanity that inhabits the living vessel.
Oil on canvas, November 2022 to September 2023
Opportunities are taken to always expand artistic expression. Sometimes the priority is to experiment with new techniques, color combinations, or anatomical studies where the goal is not to labor over a tightly woven statement, but to primarily have the freedom to explore processes with little regard for where it ends up. Releasing that concern is the only way to develop new ways of working and seeing. And so I am always working on explorations concurrently with the more artistically focused project work.
