Letting Go (oil on canvas, 2019)

(Private Collection)

I must apologize for neglecting my blog over the past few months. In addition to spending quite a bit of time working on a large scale mural for a friend, I have been busy experimenting with new color possibilities, in hope of expanding my vocabulary into uncharted territory. I have been painting for a long time and I have found that about every three years or so, usually as soon as start to gain confidence in my methods, I am compelled to go through a process of artistic rebirth, pushing myself to experiment with new ways of working and seeing. I thrive on the challenge of not knowing what my work will look like until it is finished and I have always been inclined to avoid complacency in every aspect of my life. During these periods of rebirth, which can last for several months, I work a lot, but my focus is on experimentation more than creating finished work. I used to feel guilty that I wasn't producing enough but I have learned to accept these gestational periods as a natural part of my process, just like the frigid, bleak winters that I experience here in northern Maine are a integral part of the cycle of nature that produces such wonderous beauty during the spring, summer, and autumn.

Here is a painting that I did back in July. I am quite pleased with it, but the seeming effortlessness with which it came together forced me to realize that it was time to make painting difficult again. I was about to begin work on a new painting but I felt that I already knew what it was going to look like when it was finished, which for me, is reason enough to rethink everything about my artistic process.

Absolution (oil on canvas 2019)

(Private Collection)

When I was an undergraduate in college the painter Richard Sheehan came to the campus as a visiting artist for a day. He gave a slide presentation of his work, after which he fielded questions from the audience. I was enthralled by his work, mostly cityscapes and suburban neighborhoods, many characterized by views looking through underpasses, all of which showed both impeccable draughtsmanship and compositions that were both inventive and flawless.

But what really struck me was his use of color which, although highly effective, had nothing to do with the local or perceptual color that I, at the time at least, associated with representational art. The paintings were filled with bright yellow skies, acidic lime green trees, and deep ultramarine shadows. During the question and answer period, I asked him how he chose the colors that he used. He basically said that he chose the colors that “worked for the painting”. I honestly had no idea what that meant, but not wanting to seem like an idiot, I smiled, politely thanked him, and sat back down in my seat.

I pondered his answer for years, especially when I took up painting again after a hiatus and happily rediscovered Richard Sheehan’s work on the newly launched internet.

I eventually understood exactly what he meant and realize, in retrospect, that I could never have understood the lesson until I had made (literally) hundreds of paintings. Each color in a painting is affected by and affects every other one and getting all of the colors to work together toward creating the overall image is arduous work, especially since each color seems to have a personality and will of its own – some vying for dominance and refusing to get along with the others or to back down when another color asserts itself (and they can often be both seductive and manipulative!), and other colors that just want peace and harmony. The artist's job is to bring all of this potential chaos under control and to hopefully create an arrangement of colors that looks (in spite of the oftentimes immense amount of effort and struggle involved) inevitable.

After Me (oil on canvas 2019)

Occasionally, I get asked about the titles of my paintings and what they mean. As a visual artist, I am primarily concerned with creating an experience for the viewer via visual means and I don’t want words to influence how the painting might be perceived or to tell the viewer what to see. However, I do need some way of identifying the paintings and differentialting them from one another. I know one artist who simply titles her paintings with consecutive numbers. If the last painting was “145”, then the next one is “146”. This seems like a logical way avoiding the problem of titles altogether, but it wouldn’t work for me. If someone said that they liked my painting called “223” I would have no way of knowing which painting they were talking about. The same problem would arise if I had hundreds of “untitled” paintings.

Years ago, my titles were essentially descriptive of the subject and/or the time of day or year that it was painted. If you scroll back far enough in this blog you’ll find paintings with titles like “Hay Bales at Dusk” or “Henderson Barn on a Cloudy Day”. But, in recent years, I have moved away from images that represent specific places or subjects and thus have had to find a more appropriate way of naming my paintings without spoonfeeding any content to the viewer.

My solution to this dilemma has been to keep a list of words and phrases that I like, picked up from books and poems, song lyrics, conversations, movies, etc., that could potentially be used as titles. I used to keep a hand written list taped to the wall in my studio but it recently migrated to my phone. (I’m slowly crawling into the digital age!) When I finish a painting I go to the list, pick something for a title, and then cross it off the list. Titles are constantly being added to and deleted from the list. The titles are intentionally ambiguous and rarely have anything to do with the content of the image (and if they do, it’s covert and allegorical and not something I would share with anyone) but are meant to be open to a wide range of interpretations by the viewer.

My daughter saw this painting and asked me what it was called. I told her it didn’t have a title yet, to which she responded. “Name it after me.”

As it turns out, that was one of the titles on my list (I’m not going to tell you where it comes from.), so it seemed only fitting to use it. I’ve always been one to embrace serendipity.

Tomorrow Never Comes (oil on canvas 2019)

Apparently, I have become a landscape artist, although when I was learning how to draw and paint, landscape was never an area that interested me very much. My love of Rembrandt once had me thinking that I would be primarily a figurative artist and after discovering Giorgio Morandi during my senior year of college, I spent years painting nothing but still-life subjects. It was my move to rural northern Maine that fostered my penchant for landscape subjects. I have always liked to spend a lot of time outdoors, not just drawing and painting, but walking, running, cycling, and hiking. The world I live in now is about 99.9% landscape and reminds me of the woods and farmland that once surrounded the neighborhood that I grew up in and where I spent so much time during my formative years.

There are several aspects of the landscape that appeal to me as an artist. The ever changing light and color, which are always perfect, provide a bottomless well from which to draw both knowledge and inspiration and can give the same subject a different appearance as each hour passes into the next. The delicate balance between order and chaos which exists everywhere in nature is something that I strive for in my work as well. Beneath what can appear to be a savage and violent disarray of forms is a system of such complexity as to defy human understanding. I am surrounded by vast, open areas and huge skies, interpolated by dense, almost impenetrable forests and woods, all of which provide ample fodder for someone engaged in the study of creating the illusion of three dimensional space on a flat surface. In spite of the frigid cold during winter, the vicious, blood-thirsty black flies in Spring, and the occasional north wind that can send a canvas or drawing board sailing through the air into the next county, I enjoy working outside in the fresh air.

I made a conscious decision to move my practice more indoors a few years ago as a means of finding a more personal mode of expression that is less tethered to description of specific places and more about my unique way of experiencing the world, the decade and more that I spent traipsing about the landscape near my home with drawing board or paints in hand has made a lasting impact on me and still influences everything that I do. Although my practice has moved more into the studio and I've turned inward for inspiration, I remain, metaphorically at least, an painter of the outdoors.

Something You Said (oil on canvas, 2019)

(Private Collection)
One of the most difficult aspects of working in color is the phenomenon of Simultaneous Contrast, which results in the relative perception of every color in a painting to be affected by every other color in the same painting. In its simplest terms, this means that a red placed next to a color that has green in it will appear more "red" than it actually is. A neutral grey placed in proximity to a blue will take on an orange tint. This concept of relative contrast can be experienced in all aspects of life. Where I live in northern Maine, when the temperature finally gets above thirty degrees some time in March, it's common to see people outdoors in shorts and t-shirts because, after three or four months of single digit or sub-zero temperatures, thirty degrees feels quite balmy! I stopped eating refined sugars in 1994. Years later I took a bite out of a plain bagel that, although it probably had only trace amounts of sugar in it, tasted to me like cake.

Simultaneous Contrast presents myriad problems for the visual artist because as the number of colors in an image increases, the manner in which each color affects every other one becomes exponentially complex. Frustration ensues as a color that appears bright warm red on the palette becomes a cool dark brown in the painting or, conversely, a color that appears warm brown on the palette suddenly appears as a dark cool purple in the painting and simultaneously causes the cool green that was painted in the day before to be transformed into a warm, acidic lemon yellow. A painter has to learn how to be always aware of how each color affects every other one and the relationship of each to the whole. With a great deal of practice and concentration this gets easier to do and one learns how to anticipate how colors will actually appear within the context of the painting.

I have found that mixing up the color palette for each painting before I begin to actually paint has been incredibly helpful because I can see how the colors relate to one another before I even begin to put them on the canvas. I try to give each painting that I create its own unique palette of colors. I tend to think of the color scheme as a cast of characters in a story. Sometimes it's a cast of very diverse characters and all manner of drama and conflict will arise. With this one, I made a conscious decision to keep the colors fairly close to one another in terms of value (light and dark) and saturation (intensity or purity of color), thereby reducing the overall contrast in the image and focusing instead on more subtle transitions and relationships. Sometimes it's best not to have any drama...

Far Too Many Ghosts (oil on canvas,2019)

On some level, every painting is an abstraction – a representation of something that it is not. It can depict a person or several people, an place, an object or group of objects. It can be a depiction of a narrative - either fictional, historical, personal, or fantasy. How accurately the image depicts its subject depends on the artist, their intent, their level of skill, and the choices that they make.

But a painting can also just be a painting – colored pigments mixed with fat and pushed around on a flat surface. The painting can also be a visible record of the act of painting. Each mark is a representation of a specific movement and choice made by the artist, some carefully calculated and others borne of intuition and spontaneity. The narrative, if one takes the time to really look at the painting, tells the story of the artist bringing the image from the void into fruition. This is what really interests me.

I work primarily in oil paint, soft pastel and charcoal. What I like about these media is their pliability. They can be put down onto the substrate and then manipulated, transformed, pushed around, or even removed if need be. I find this quality to be not only immensely appealing, but a necessary component to my artistic practice. I am not interested in hiding the act of painting in order to deceive the viewer into thinking that they are seeing something that isn't there. I want the act of painting and my engagement with the materials to be an integral part of the final image. Working with pliable materials such as oil paint, which will stay wet for several days, affords me ample opportunities to scrape and smudge, to mix and modify colors right on the canvas, and to sharpen or blur the transition from one shape into the next. I used to try to finish a painting whilst all of the paint was wet but over the past few years I have been experimenting with allowing parts of the painting to become tacky or dry and then working on top of them, achieving effects and a visual density that would not be possible any other way.

I have mentioned in previous posts how the act of painting for me often feels like being engaged in mortal combat. I like to think that the intensity and violence inherent in that struggle comes across in an image like this one.

After Forever (oil on canvas, 2019)

Sometimes when I am working with a student, explaining to them what is not working in their drawing or painting and showing them how to correct it, they will exclaim' "This is really hard!"

Making art is, indeed, difficult, especially if one aims to do it well. Aspiring artists must become fluent in the language of visual form and proficient with whichever media they choose to use as their primary mode of expression, all of which requires an inordinate amount of study and practice, combined with the tenacity to continue to work in spite of the frequent and seemingly insurmountable obstacles that every artist eventually faces. And sometimes, more frequently if you are a beginner, the work isn't very good. This has nothing to do with a lack of talent; it's simply a by-product of the learning process. And working creatively means taking risks and attempting to do things that you've never done before - pushing the boundaries of your abilities and expectations. I've spent tens of thousands of hours drawing and painting in my lifetime and, although I have built up a considerable amount of skill and knowledge, I still find myself challenged every time I work because I intentionally try to extend the limits of my practice and to make images that I have never seen before. My need to be surprised by the outcome is one of the main factors that drives me to work in the first place. If I am not challenging my own expectations, how can I possibly challenge those of the viewer?

If you are involved in any creative endeavor, whether it be visual art, a musical instrument, writing, or any of the myriad forms of creative expression, and you find yourself struggling with the difficulties of developing technique and feeling like you're paddling against the current, remember that the most important thing is that you keep working. Instruction and feedback from others who are involved in your field can be useful and can expedite certain aspects of the learning process (and learning how to take criticism without bring offended is vital to artistic growth) but there's no substitute for hard work. And you have to allow yourself to fail. A lot. Seriously. The greatest teachers I've ever had have been my own failures.

Talent isn't a gift. It's the reward for thousands of hours of hard work.

After All This TIme (oil on canvas, 2019)

I have often remarked how being engaged with a painting feels to me like some kind of martial combat. Although no one is going to die if the work fails, I nonetheless always feel as if my very survival depends on successfully completing the painting. This is the result of my artistic process being one that relies on risk taking, improvisation, discovery, and not knowing what a picture is going to look like until it is finished. I firmly believe that working this way is the only conduit to true creativity, but the price one pays for working this way is the ever-present risk of failure and the inherent stress that comes with it.

I recently read “The Book of Five Rings” by the 17th century Japanese sword master Miyamoto Musashi. It is a fascinating and inspiring text, which is essentially about the strategy of sword fighting and martial arts in general, but its principles apply to all aspects of life, especially the creative process. The essence of Musashi's teaching is the importance of training and practice outside the context of actual combat, so that the instinctive, split-second decisions that one makes when engaged with an opponent will be the decisions that lead to victory.

Training, study, and practice are the core of any successful creative act; one must be a master of their materials, techniques and the language of their particular form in order to create art. Creative acts are characterized primarily by intuition and spontaneity and reacting to the work as it unfolds. In a similar manner, martial combat is characterized by reacting intuitively to one's opponent. Musashi writes a lot about the importance of "Hyoshi" (usually translated as "cadence") which refers to being engaged with the opponent in a rhythmic way, sensitive to the movement of energy back and forth, and reacting to it in a purely instinctive way, without thinking, and trusting that you have trained thoroughly. Modern psychologists refer to this concept as "flow". When I am engrossed in a painting or drawing, the experience is similar (without, of course, the threat of death!) and I find it necessary to focus and pay attention to the image as it develops. Sometimes I will add a color or mark to a painting or drawing and the image will yield - bending to my actions and revealing new possibilities that might lead to a successful outcome. At other times, the painting will resist and push back, causing me to retreat. My working process usually vacillates between long periods of intense, focused, frenzied activity and periods of simply staring at the image while attempting to figure out what it needs (or leaving the studio in frustration and going for a long walk!). This back and forth is an essential part of the process for me and, although it feels very much like a duel while I am immersed in it, it is a challenge that I ultimately relish.

Admittedly, there are times when these engagements end in defeat - something that I have learned to accept as an inevitable part of the creative process. But when the work is successful, there comes a tremendous sense of accomplishment, which, in the end, makes all of the stress, study, practice, and hard work worthwhile.

Sunday Morning Bliss (2019, oil on canvas)

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
-Tao de Ching

I studied and played music for many years, before an overuse injury forced me to relinquish my musical aspirations almost 22 years ago. It was devastating blow to my psyche at the time. I had chosen to abandon my graduate studies in fine art so I could focus on music, foregoing any alternate career path in favor of devoting long hours to study, practice, rehearsal and performance, as well as all of the marketing-related duties associated with leading a musical group. Suddenly finding myself unable to even hold a guitar pick left me feeling aimless and dejected, at least until my innate tenacity forced me to re-enroll in art school and begin painting again, ultimately leading me back to my first (and true) love. Occasionally, we might find ourselves astray in a rugged and impenetrable wilderness, thinking that we have irrevocably lost our path, only to one day stumble upon our destination and the realization that whatever trials and tribulations we had suffered while seemingly lost, were necessary rites of passage.

The study of music taught me a great deal about visual art and I constantly find myself thinking about the parallels between the two forms. Value (lights and darks) is like rhythm in music. Areas of strong value contrast are like staccato passages in music, with pronounced beats surrounded by bits of silence. Conversely, areas in a painting and drawing with little or now value contrast are like legato passages in music, where the notes transition smoothly one into the next with no space between.

One of the biggest similarities between music and art is the correlation between pitch and color. Interestingly, the color theory that my approach is based on uses a 12 step color wheel composed of three primaries (yellow, red, blue), three secondaries made by combining the primaries (orange, green, violet) and the intermediate colors between each primary and secondary (red-orange, yellow-green, etc.) arranged so that the complimentary colors are opposite one another. Western music is composed of 12 pitches and the associated keys are often diagramed in a circle (the Circle of 5ths) with contrasting keys (the ones with the fewest notes in common and, hence, the most dissonance when played together) opposite each other. I organize my paintings using color tonalities in a way that is very similar to how a composer organizes a piece of music around specific tonalities. The ultimate goal in both cases is harmony.

Sometimes these color tonalities are fairly simple. Like a tune written exclusively with the notes in the C-major scale, I might create an image based entirely on variations of the color green. More often, though, I like more complex tonalities, like a piece of music that modulates through several keys. I rarely think this way while actually working, but years of practice (and a multitude of failures!) have developed my ability to organize and harmonize the colors intuitively in my attempt to transform my content into visual form.

This painting is based, essentially, on the analogous cool colors: ranging from red-violet to violet to blue-violet to blue and blue-green – colors which all contain some measure of blue, the coolest color. This helps give the painting its overall cool feeling, but there are also quite few warmer colors including yellow, yellow-green and orange which, having been weakened by the addition of white (what we artists refer to as "tinting"), provide just enough contrasts to actually make the cool colors seem even cooler than if they were the only colors in the painting. This is common practice amongst music composers as well, who will insert a "sad" minor chord into an overall "happy" major key-based piece, the resulting contrast making the happier sounding chords seem even happier.

I find this approach very helpful in my work and I don't think I could have developed the ability to think this way about color had I not spent years away from painting, with my attention focused on the study of music. The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to have faith that our lives will unfold exactly the way they are meant to. How could it be otherwise?

When You Least Expect It (oil on canvas, 2019)

I live in northern Maine. It has been brutally cold here this winter and we're on the verge of breaking the record for annual snow accumulation. A few days ago, however, we were afforded a brief respite from the sub-zero temperatures and snowfall and I siezed the opportunity to go for a walk. I thought about the seemingly countless hours that I spent, especially during the first eight or nine years that I've lived here, trekking around the landscape within a three mile radius of my house, in all manner of weather, laden with a sketchbook or drawing board and a backpack filled with drawing materials, until I would eventually stop in some field or woods and attempt to translate what I was looking at into some kind of visual form. I was trying to make art. More often than not, however, I failed. I would occasionally end up with a really great drawing or painting or a sketch that I would later develop into a successful image. I've posted a lot of them here on this blog over the past ten years and many of the best paintings and drawings ended up in the hands of collectors, thus enabling me to continue to pursue my passion.

But the majority of the work that I did made it's way, sooner or later, into the landfill.

During my struggles to turn my experiences into visual form, I learned a great deal about drawing, composition, color mixing, paint application and how to manipulate art materials in a way that creates the illusion of solid form, light and atmospheric space, on a flat surface. I also learned many other important lessons such as how to keep an easel from blowing away in the wind, not to use oil paint outdoors during black fly season, to always spray the pastel fixative downwind, thunderstorms move faster than I can run, and to be polite to the Border Patrol agents whenever they feel the need to interrogate me. But the most important lesson that I learned was about both the inevitability and the necessity of failure. Despite my best efforts and my extensive training, sometimes the work just isn't going to be successful. This is no reflection on my "talent" or lack thereof but, rather, an integral part of the creative process which involves taking risks, pushing beyond the boundaries of our technical and theoretical abilities and trusting our instincts. In so doing, we give up a great deal of control over the final outcome and we risk failure, but the payoff is that, sometimes, we surprise ourselves with wonderful work that comes from a place that our intellect does not have access to.

If you are involved in any kind of creative endeavor, it's imperative that you allow yourself the freedom to fail. Rather than letting the fear of failure inhibit you from working, you should embrace the fear and work as much as possible. When we force ourselves to go outside our comfort zones, real learning and real creativity happen.

I estimate that I've spent over 10,000 hours, with art supplies at hand, out in the landscape around my home since moving to Maine in 2006. Although a significant percentage of that time was spent walking, absorbing the colors and light, sounds and smells, and the history of the landscape, the bulk of the time was spent pushing pastels or charcoal or graphite or oil paint around on a sheet of paper or canvas, in the hopes of pulling a cohesive image out of the Æther. If I were to compare the amount of time that I spent to the number of actual finished works of art that I created, I might easily dismay. But it was time well spent. Not only did I learn myriad methods of successfully transforming mere art materials into physical manifestations of the visceral experiences I was having, I learned just about every conceivable way of failing to do that.

During all of those thousands of hours, I thought I was trying to make art, but what I was really trying to do was to make an artist.