Sentinels, oil on canvas, 2023

I made a small (10" x 8") painting based on this idea, which came from a pastel drawing that did from memory after first drawing this subject in graphite from direct observation. Thus, this larger canvas (36" x 30") is four times removed from the original subject. My initial inspiration, however, is manifested more in this painting than any of the other, earlier works. The reason for this is that an objective representation of the visual attributes of the subject is of very little importance to me. I'm much more interested in creating an image that represents my emotional response to the initial encounter with the subject. The further removed I am from objective description the better.

I always have difficulty with the word "realism" when applied to art. Typically, a work of art that looks exactly like the subject is refered to as "realistic" but, as far as I am concerned, nothing could be more artificial than a painting that doesn't look like a painting.

Remains of the Day (oil on canvas, 2022)

I have spent many thousands of hours drawing from direct observation. For me, it has been a way to both develop technique and, more importantly, to develop fluency in the language of visual form. When you stand before a subject with a blank surface and some type of mark-making instrument you are faced with an almost infinite number of ways to translate what you are seeing into some kind of visual form. What parts of the subject to include in the composition and how to compose the subject within some kind of a frame, whether to use a linear approach or to use shapes, how to render the value relationships, whether to use objective colors as you see them or to use a more creative, subjective approach to color, how much detail to include or to draw in a more abstract, suggestive way. Grappling with these myriad choices is an inherent part of the drawing process. A visual artist, when working representationally, can, if they have the skill, render a convincing likeness of their subject but they can also render other content that is not based on optical perception. An artist can suggest emotions, atmosphere and weather, convey a narrative, create a sense of drama, and force the viewer to see things that they might not otherwise notice. All of these elements, including optical representation, are communicated through the use of visual language using lines, shapes, values, textures, colors, and the means by which these elements are organized.

For the past ten years or so, I have focused more on drawing in my studio, from memory and imagination, as a method of finding ways to convey “non-visual” elements through visual language. When working in this way, the emphasis is on visually representing the intangible, similar to how a musical composer might convey emotions or narrative through the arrangement of sounds. Although it may seem like a purely self-indulgent act of playing with the materials and seeing what happens, it is actually a much more focused attempt to create a visual representation of something. The struggle, through the process of drawing, is still about representing the subject visually, but the reference is not something that I am looking at; rather, it is something from inside, but the rules of effective visual communication still apply. It is actually more challenging than drawing a subject from direct observation because there is no reference for me to compare my work to. In the end, I am really the only one who can assess whether or not the work is a success.

When the Spell is Broken (oil on canvas, 2022)

Everyone will view a work of art in their own personal, subjective way. We bring to the experience of looking at art our own personality traits, history, tastes, prejudices, cultural associations, etc. so it is impossible for two people to have exactly the same experience when viewing a work of art. The same is true when it comes to reading books, listening to music, and watching films. We even have different experiences when we see the same work of art at different times in our lives because we have changed. I saw the exhibition of Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings and drawings in 1987 when had just left graduate school and I was underwhelmed by the work. This experience had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with me and what my priorities and interests were at the time, along with my inexperience and lack of fluency in visual language. This past Spring, a student brought a copy of the catalogue to that same exhibition to class and, upon looking through it, I was literally awestruck at the brilliance of the work, made all the more striking because of my previous experience. I immediately got on my phone and ordered a copy of the catalogue from eBay! Studying the work over the Summer, I became all too aware of how much our experience of viewing art has to do with us and not the artist.

Still, an artist who has knowledge of how to communicate effectively through the language of visual form and an understanding of their target audience can construct a work so that the majority of people that see it will have a somewhat similar experience. Oftentimes, this simply involves choosing subjects that are laden with symbolism and rendering them in an objectively realist style or a well-trodden style (e.g. Impressionism) that has obvious and proven connotations.

Other artists, however, choose to create work that encourages the viewer to have a very subjective experience. Their work is intentionally ambiguous. Rather than spoon feeding the meaning to the viewer, they challenge the viewer to find their own meaning in the work. Rather than presenting the viewer with a window that allows them to look out or in on something, they present a mirror, hopefully giving the viewer an opportunity to look inside themselves. Neither of these approaches is better than the other. It really comes down to what the artist’s intentions are. In my own work, I have transitioned away from creating images with fairly obvious meaning to works that are more ambiguous because I want people to have their own unique experience when they view my work. One of the greatest compliments I get is when I paint something from my imagination, and someone tells me that they recognize the place.

The Days Before You Came (oil on canvas, 2022)

(Private Collection)
When I was studying art as an undergraduate, back in the "20th century" (as my son likes to say when he wants to remind me how old I am!), many of today's common hazardous materials regulations didn't exist. We could use spray fixative in the studios and everyone who painted used turpentine as a solvent and for cleaning brushes. Students and teachers even used to smoke in the studios, although not during classes. By current OSHA regulations, tobacco products, turpentine, and spray fixatives cannot even be brought on campus. I don't miss the cigarette smoke and I have found spray fixatives that don't have the nasty, toxic odor of the ones I used in college (although they cost about three times as much!). Except for when I'm laying down a burnt sienna underpainting, using large house painting brushes, I almost always paint with knives, so I don't have the need for cleaning brushes anymore. When I do, I use odorless mineral spirits. When I have students, I insist that they also use odorless mineral spirits so I can be in compliance with OSHA standards and to avoid anyone having a negative reaction to turpentine fumes. Once, a student brought some kind of citrus based solvent that was supposed to be environmentally safe (according to the label, anyway). The fumes were horrendous and gave all of us headaches and nausea, and the student who brought the stuff ended up losing consciousness. I brought him outside for some fresh air, which quickly revived him and he was fine in the end, but I have since banned citrus-based solvents from the studio.

But I do get nostalgic for the aroma of gum turpentine. I use it in small amounts in my main painting medium (It's a secret recipe, so don't even ask!). Whenever I smell it, I am instantly transported back to my youth as a struggling undergraduate art major with grandiose aspirations of becoming the next Rembrandt or Dürer, whilst struggling to figure out how to paint convincing shadows or to properly compose a drawing. I have bittersweet memories of those days. The many long, arduous hours of labor to produce mostly mediocre works of art were often demoralizing and I had practically no social life or time for other interests. Yet, somehow, I managed to remain optimistic despite my numerous "failures". I tell my students now that they will have to make a lot of bad pictures before they start making good ones so don't look at the bad pictures as failures; they are successes because each one means that you have one fewer bad pictures to make. I know that might sound like a platitude, but I wish someone had said that to me when I was in my early 20s. Not that it would have made much difference, I suppose. I kept working anyway....

From a Safe Distance (oil on canvas, 2022)

(Private Collection)
As a Visual Arts Studio major in college, I was required to take a two-semester Survey of Art course, which was an art history course that provided a cursory overview of the history of Western (mostly European) art, beginning with the cave paintings in Lascaux through some of the art movements of the early 20th century, including Cubism and Surrealism. What I remember most from that course was that we spent an inordinate amount of time studying the architecture of churches and cathedrals. I also had the opportunity to take two additional Art History elective courses. One was a small, seminar-style course on Northern Renaissance Art, and the other was a Modern Art course, which covered the major art movements of the first half of the 20th century. I wanted to take a course on Baroque and Roccoco Art during my last semester, but as a Studio Art major, I was not permitted to take more than four art history courses. My advisor suggested that I talk to the instructor about the possibility of auditing the course. He told me that there was not enough space in the classroom for an additional desk, but he needed a work/study student to operate the slide projector. So I was able to sit in on all of the lectures whilst getting paid for it! Win. Win.

Looking back, those five undergraduate courses probably account for less than 1% of all of the art history that I have studied. I started collecting books about art when I was still a student and it continues to be an obsession. I have hundreds of art books in my house and studio and, with the exception of the pile of recent acquisitions in my living room, I have read and studied all of them. I often refer back to many of my books for inspiration, to revisit topics, or to give students actual of examples of concepts that I am teaching them, or to see how one of the masters may have solved a specific visual problem that I am struggling with.

I believe that artists have a responsibilty to know as much as possible about the history of their craft. This is a lifelong study. We can learn a great deal from the artists of the past who have struggled to find creative solutions to many of the same visual problems that all of us face regularly. Oftentimes, such solutions became new ways of working and seeing, and they can inspire us to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable visual obstacles.

Everything You've Loved (oil on canvas, 2022)

(Private Collection)

When I was in my fourth year of college as an undergrad student I did an independent study in painting with an instructor named Dan Hill. I would go to his office once a week with all of the work that I had done and we would look at it and talk about it. He would make suggestions, mostly in the form of exercises that would help me focus on development of specific technical deficiences, of which I had many! The exercises were extremely helpful and I would usually do more than what he suggested. One such exercise involved painting a flat red rectrangle, maybe 5" x 3", in the center of a 9" x 12" canvasboard. I then had to paint the rest of the canvas so that it appeared concave behind the flat red rectangle. I repeated the exercise, but with the background appearing convex, and then again with the background appearing to recede from left to right, top to bottom, etc.. Although tedious and difficult, these exercises were very helpful in terms of teaching me how to use color and value to make a flat surface appear three-dimensional and I am still grateful to this day for the time spent working on them.

Meanwhile, I was also attemting to make these ridiculously ambitious landscape paintings that were years (perhaps decades) beyond my technical abilities at the time. Eventually, I scaled back to simple still lifes painted from direct observation so that I could focus on the fundamentals of how to transform oil colors into form, space, and light. Early in the semester, however, I brought in a painting in progress of a filed with round hay bales in it, a barn in the distance, and large cumulus clouds in a blue sky. I had recently purchased a French easel and had taken my painting supplies out into that field, which was only a couple of miles from my house, and painted from observation. I felt like a "real" artist. The painting, of course, was a disaster. On seeing it, Dan Hill suggested that I look up John Constable, who had painted a lot of cloud studies. Neither of us had any idea at the time how precient that was. Constable would eventually become a major influence for me, and I might some day find myself painting clouds in a way that wasn't a disaster.

All Your Broken Pieces (oil on canvas, 2022)

(Private Collection)

Artists who work in two dimensional media (painting, drawing, printmaking, etc.) have to contend with two different types of space in their work.

Decorative space refers to the two-dimensional arrangement of forms on the picture plane. These two-dimensional forms (primarily lines and shapes) can be arranged in such a way as to create balance or imbalance, movement or stability, order or chaos, and to establish a visual heirarchy.

Plastic space refers to the illusion of three-dimensions on the flat surface of the picture plane. When utilizing plastic space, the artist is always either creating the illusion of a solid, three-dimensional form or the illusion of empty, three-dimensional space. It's virtually impossible to have one without the other (although I have seen Mark Rothko paintings that just look like empty space). We create this illusion through the skillful use of visual form. Lines, shapes, values, and colors can be made to appear to be different distances from each other and from the viewer depending on how they are organized within the picture plane. For example, across the middle section of this painting, the cool, dark, blackish violets appear to be farhter away than the warmer red-oranges, giving the illusion of a dense thicket. The yellow, which is actually below, appears to be in front of this area of warm reds and cool violets, thus creating the illusion of empty space between the picture plane and the middle section of the canvas. Of course, all of this is smoke and mirrors; the painting is flat.

When I am working on a painting like this, I am always keenly aware of how the plastic space is developing. I usually begin with a vague sense of the kind of space that I am attemting to create and as the painting develops, I notice how different parts will advance or recede as I work. When I put a bit of color down it will cause other parts of the painting to appear closer or farther away and I am continually making adjustments until I acheive the spatial effects that I want. This can be quite difficult to learn how to do, but there is nothing mysterious or magical about it. It's mostly just physics. Anyone can learn how to do it, although it certainly requires a lot of practice. I am often asked how I know when a painting is finished. That is a complicated question that doesn't have a definitive answer but I will not stop working on a painting until I know that the sense of plastic space is unified.

A Private Little Sun (oil on canvas, 2021)

Painting is a visual art but it can be used to convey much more than visual information. In addition to, or instead of, simply showing the viewer what the subject looked like, an artist can, through skillful use of their materials and a knowledge of the language of visual form, suggest sounds, weather, emotions, movement, texture, and narrative. The elements of visual form - lines, shapes, colors, values, etc. - are analogous to the characters and words in any verbal language. Fluency in the language of visual form can be the means for communicating an infinite number of concepts, both objective facts and subjective ideas.

Of course, a painting can be a means of conveying a wealth of information, describing the appearance of a subject in great detail. This can oftentimes be very useful, but a painting created for this purpose can be thought of as a textbook. Personally, I prefer to think of a painting like a poem, in which common words and phrases are organized in such a way as to evoke an emotion, a feeling, memories, or some fundamental truth that transcends the literal meaning of the words.

Although the inspiration for my paintings comes from places that I have seen, I am more concerned with creating images that represent the way those places made me feel, rather than what they looked like. As a result, the images are decidedly subjective and personal, yet I hope to touch on the universal and create an image that will resonate with each person who sees it.