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.