Artist’s Statement
After 30 years I feel I am just beginning to paint the way I had hoped to paint. I stand in front of nature, in front of some real three-dimensional fact, and respond to it with paint or ink in the most pure and direct manner I can muster up out of myself. I am not a snob about oil paint; I just love the material, the consistency of it, the way it smells and, of course, most of all, the way the colors mix and create action and surprise on the canvas.
But even though everything gets started out in nature or in front of nature somehow I keep working and changing things in the studio, usually working on several things at the same time. Sometimes the original response gets completely buried! For many years it was very hard for me to improve things in the studio so if it wasn’t good in the first big attack chances are they would die. Many many did. That’s what’s different now: I often can make improvements in the studio away from nature.
I am a city boy who moved to the country at age 25 and a great deal of my adult life has been spent in rural settings hiking the hills, wading the rivers and exploring the lakes in my canoe.
I look at the spaces between things and the relation of the sky to the land and how plants and trees grow- the energy of them. It’s the feeling of all that I try to capture – an impossible task. And because it is impossible to capture, there is a lot of tension informing the painting or drawing.
The subject is the vehicle for the expression of my emotions in paint. This is nothing new, I know, but we are all different and the extent to which we can be ourselves in our artwork is the degree to which we are successful as artists. That is my belief and conviction.
For more about my painting, photography and writing, you can visit this website:
Education:
- Northfield Mount Hermon School 1959-1963
- Brown University 1963-1967
- Rhode Island School of Design 1975-1978; BFA and MFA
Currently I am a member of the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts and the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, New Hapmshire.
I am also on the board of Vermont North By Hand, a group of regional artists who open their studios for a tour in October.
I am part of the state-wide Vermont Studio Tour sponsored by the Vermont Craft Council.
In the last ten years I was Chair of the Art Department at Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, Washington and Painting and Drawing Instructor at the American International School in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
In the year 2000 I received a grant for painting at the Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain.
I have exhibited at galleries in New York and New England and in the Pacific Northwest.