Some Abstracts


Chunky
No title on these, they are 9″ x 12″, oil on panel. I do a few when I’m stuck.
Though they don’t seem to have a”subject”, they feel very much like my “representational” paintings.


Chunky
No title on these, they are 9″ x 12″, oil on panel. I do a few when I’m stuck.
Though they don’t seem to have a”subject”, they feel very much like my “representational” paintings.
“INPUT” OIL ON CANVAS 16″ X 16″ 2008
The place in which I live doesn’t so much deliver content for my work, rather the place and it’s “content” seeps in. The people, the environment are a finely tuned and sensitive system that digs it’s heels in and resists change. I was just doing some dumb painting studies of rocks, trying to simplify things as much as possible - But in looking at the work and discussing it with visitors I sense this new series of paintings of rocks is about the subtle and unseen shifts that occur in people, institutions and place as a result of this intransigence. Resistance is often a symptom of the change being in fact much more radical and deep than it appears. Putting fuel into and providing an exhaust pipe for an inert object seems a futile endeavor….. yet something went into forming that rock, and it will eventually trasnsform into some other solid, gas or liquid.
“OUTPUT” OIL ON CANVAS 16″ X 16″ 2008
Advanced Carpentry 56″ x 46″
Oil on Canvas 2008
It has been a while since I have posted. It’s not that I don’t have new work. Just trying some new things and haven’t wanted to put more images up. This one is from last month, every time I think I’m going to try and make the spaces in the paintings more complex, they defy me by not working. Eventually it gets pared down to something more basic. The paint seems to be winning out over my determination on deciding what stays and what goes. I guess I’ve always been perplexed by situations and styles that are overdetermined, all the while admiring them and wishing I could map out the steps and process and follow the instructions. My work likes to taunt me with that ever present spontaneity that I sneer at in myself.
Restoration Oil on Canvas 48″ x 48″
Rub a dub dub, 3 tubs in a tub. Waiting for the water’s to rise, for the water to calm down, for it to heat up or cool down. This painting from a current series I am working on is driven by some observations of bizarre hydroponic re-inventions of vessels, and totems to the human driven evolution of form and substance.

New Paintings, Summer 2007

Helena and me
Raft of The Medusa Oil on Canvas 28″ x 28″ 2007
Boat Crowded with Provisions. This is in the collection of Persimmon Blackridge, an artist whom I admire greatly and with whose work I feel a lot of affinity.
Oil on Canvas 48″ x 48″ 2007
A bigger variation on a painting from last year, “Hoodoos” - Rereading Freud’s “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought” from Totem and Taboo. “…the relationship between magic (paranormal), superstition and taboo, (and) the practices of animistic systems are cree behind which lies instinctual repression.”
Patrol Boat Oil on Canvas 36″ x 48″ 2007
Journeys upriver are a thematic story throughout my life, all lives. The Mekong, the Amazon, Lewis and Clark…. A psychological construct otherwise known as Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. This particular version of “Apocalypse Now” was inspired by the Civil War ironclads.