IMAGES | STATEMENT | RESUME

Looking back at my days as an undergraduate studying drawing and painting in the early 1980s, I’m struck by the fact that there were so many contradictions in what I learned. My instructors came of age in the 1950s with both feet planted firmly in the school of Abstract Expressionism, where the surface of the work was the only true reality. Any attempt at narrative or depiction seemed a hopelessly outmoded form of expression. Yet concurrently, I was drawing from the figure nearly every day, attempting to master the very time-honored tradition they had forsworn. If this curriculum confused many students, I was certainly one of the bewildered. In those days, that mixed message I received always disturbed me. I suppose my work since then has been an attempt at reconciling two opposing philosophies.

I found what I hoped to be an answer many years ago with pure light. It lent itself readily to abstraction yet allowed me to explore the realism with which I was always so comfortable. So I painted pure sunlight, at first streaming into my apartment, creating arbitrary geometric forms that I could render within a very naturalistic framework. I loved the play of representation versus abstraction within the same painting, for it allowed me a foot in both art historical camps. Soon objects began to creep into my empty room compositions. I reveled in depicting their textures and surfaces with oil paint, as much as any student of the still life. But every artist is very much a part of his or her time and the legacy of the modern is a part of mine. So I have always tried to follow a self-imposed rule: would my painting make for an interesting abstraction if devoid of anything recognizable?

My work is still about those contradictions: a love of illusion and rendered textures that could easily be an end in and of itself. By this fact, it may be considered sensual, but it is equally concerned with the intangible and abstract qualities of pure light. It may be considered highly realistic, but realism for its own sake has never held much interest for me. That sense of contradiction that was awakened in me as a student has never left. If anything, I’ve become more uncomfortably aware of the opposite poles that co-exist in all our experience: familiar and unfamiliar, earthly and spiritual, light and dark, transitory and timeless. In that sense, my instructors succeeded. Each painting is an exploration of the dynamic between two opposing extremes and a striving for perfect balance.