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.