My Portals
I am fascinated by portals, doorways between differing realities. Portals appear in many forms: windows, mirrors, paintings, books, imaginings, desires. A recent gallery show featured several paintings from my “Gorilla Portals” series. At the reception, I was asked repeatedly to discuss the thread of meanings in the series, and I failed utterly each […]
Aviary
I have always envied birds their ability to fly. At some point, I began to wonder if, perhaps, the birds in turn envy us our opposable thumbs. I started several years ago drawing birds with human hands for feet, and began to notice that, once endowed with thumbs, they tended to take on other […]
The Shadow Man
“The String Man and the Shadow Man Converse” 2020 The “Shadow Man” made his first appearance as a character in two colláge/drawings from a series that encompassed the early months of the Covid 19 pandemic. A thin, gray, mostly featureless character, he represents an ever-present awareness of mortality. Unlike the frightening cliché of the dispassionate […]
I Love to Draw
Original post October 12, 2018 I love to draw. Trying to bring imagined things into concrete, graphic form is the most mentally exhausting, most ultimately satisfying thing that I do. Although every drawing falls short, still every drawing is a small victory.Art is an effort to communicate ideas. Every work of art is an attempt […]
The Colláge Series
Each of these images began as an abstract arrangement of shapes made without an image in mind, a colláge built by gluing various materials (various papers, thin slices of wood) to a backing of cotton rag board. The characters and their individual narratives emerged from these simple abstractions, and I drew them as they […]
Some Musings
Original post July 28.2010 For several years I helped to run weekly life drawing sessions at AVA, a local community art center. One night we had a young woman named Melissa modeling. It was her first time, and she was quite good, and we used her frequently for a couple of years. Most […]
Who? What? Where?
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Stop and Look
Original post December 12, 2015 “I love your work, but it wouldn’t work in my house.” I hear some version of this almost every time I exhibit. My response has always been, “How is it that your house is not filled with things you love?” Here’s the trick: Stop thinking of art as decoration. […]
En Garde!
Original post April 6, 2016 My brother Pat and I were kids in the 1950s. It was a time before computers and cell phones, and for my family, even (mostly) for television. We would not have a TV set at our house until I was in high school. I went to Jim Perlinski’s house […]