Artist Statement

What draws you to a painting? Everyone has a different answer. Some people see a bunch of colors that would look good above their sofa. For others, maybe a picture jabs them in some hidden corner of their spirit they didn’t even know about. Everyone wants something different from art.

When I look at a picture I want it to penetrate my consciousness with something that grabs me. It has nothing to do with a particular art style or a specific painter. A successful painting seizes your eye and takes you for a journey. It forcibly directs your vision around the canvas, stopping here and there, with different things revealing themselves at different times. You keep coming back until it releases you, temporarily, to catch your breath.

Everyone wants to know who an artist likes, who inspires them. There are a thousand painters I admire, a hundred I love, and a few that just plain knock me out. Rembrandt, for example. Have you ever stood in front of his pair of oval “pendant” portraits of an elderly Dutch couple in the Met? I can stand there, staring at them, absorbing their weird, compelling communication until my feet get sore and the guards are getting nervous. What about Goya! He’s another one. But there is just one whom I’d really, really want to be (art-wise, that is) if I could be one painter. Okay, here it is. Le Douanier, Henri Rousseau.

Here’s a list of inspirations, far from complete and in no particular order:

  • The Hudson River school painters for the loveliness of their vision.
  • Van Gogh for giving us a breathtaking glimpse of another dimension
  • Gauguin’s colors and purity
  • Henri Rousseau’s magic
  • Picasso’s pure design
  • Max Ernst
  • Joan Miro’s shapes
  • Ancient Egyptian art for its beauty
  • Rembrandt for his pictures’ uncanny ability to communicate
  • Rembrandt for so many other reasons
  • Goya’s radiance
  • George Catlin
  • The European 19th century orientalists
  • Jackson Pollock’s drips. So amazing
  • Georgia O’Keeffe, who I was determined not to like from the ubiquitous posters, but do anyway after seeing her originals
  • Emily Carr
  • Rockwell Kent, so strong and wild
  • The original Taos painters
  • Thomas Hart Benton
  • Red Grooms
  • 19th Century British watercolorists
  • Ancient Peruvian desert ceramic figures
  • Islamic architecture and tiles
  • Thomas Kinkade, for giving so many regular people loads of pleasure from art

That enough? The list never ends.

Color is everything. I can’t imagine painting without lush color, mixing and re-mixing and blending and glazing and gooping colors until they are the way they absolutely need to be, expressing their infinite subtlety. Nothing matches oil paint for color depth and subtlety and gradation. “Colorist” is an epitath I’d like on my tombstone. Georgia O’Keefe, Paul Gauguin, and of course Vincent (among so many others) are marvelous painters, but I see them mainly in terms of color. Wow!

For me, the return of representational painting to the mainstream is like coming out of the ice age! After all, our subconscious speaks to us in specific images that derive from our experience as humans. The re-emergence of representation from the long shadows of abstraction is akin to that of the surrealists, who fought centuries of European academy painting tradition to expose the underlayers of the mind and psyche with a new kind of imagery. Today, a new wave of ‘psychological’ (for lack of a better word) painters is shaking up the art world. We owe a debt of gratitude to both the ‘outsiders’ and the surrealists for their courage and explorations, and now we seek to take their searches further into the back corners of the mind.

As for me, well, I paint dreams. Visions, actually. I can’t tell you exactly where they come from. Most people would agree that my paintings offer a glimpse of a slightly different universe, one diverging from yours. You won’t find a pretty Tuscan vineyard or a magenta sunset on a beach. You might find a still life, though. You will find portraits, though they may not be quite what the Dutch masters had in mind.

I try to paint that otherworldly, aetherial dimension that invades my brain - give the viewer as complete an experience of it as I can. I try to make each painting breathe and pulse with something above, beyond, more. I want it to keep projecting that dreaminess forever. I want it to look fresh after a lifetime of staring and absorbing. I want that picture to be active, proactive, even radioactive, to keep coming at you. That’s a tall order. If it’s just passively absorbing your gaze and not giving anything back, any painting’s a dud.

Painting is trance-like, at best, and out of the trance visions bubble up from a place I can’t really describe. Sometimes I feel like a medium, downloading images from a distant planet or an alternate dimension onto the canvas. The pictures develop like a photo in a darkroom, emerging bit by bit into a unified whole that I can only try to make as complete as possible. I know I’m done when the picture releases me to move on. It’s exhausting and maybe dangerous to be ruled, even temporarily, by another dimension.

One series I come back to occasionally, the Toy Portraits, are almost like formal portraits of objects that intrigue me: folk art, toys, old things I stumble on in out of the way places. Like the open-air market in Katmandu's Durbar square, where I’ve been many times and where one day I scooped up a hoard of old carved, painted wooden monkey figures. No one knew where they came from, or had seen many others like them. The figures in these paintings often combine a strange emotional tension with a whimsical quality that has a great appeal to children and adults alike. Their personalities are not simple. They are sentient! Children comprehend and appreciate my pictures on a level forgotten by many adults. Kids are much purer than adults when it comes to art.

Once in a while I'll continue my Guitar Portrait series, with snazzy electric guitars, record albums, oriental rugs and who knows what else. The Guitar Portraits began with “Blue Jag,” a portrait of a vintage Fender Jaguar electric guitar atop an imaginary Nepalese rug loosely based on a rug I bought in a small village in Nepal during a lengthy trek through the Himalayas. This painting is currently in the collection of a wealthy guitar-loving art collector based in Florida. Many more guitar portraits have followed. These unique, kaleidoscopic compositions create a tableau of intense detail that challenge the viewer, over and over.  

A relatively recent body of work involves a sometimes radical departure from the visual elements associated with Buddhist/Hindu religious art that has a history thousands of years old. Using the basic structural elements of Buddhist sculpture, this growing collection juxtaposes classical poses of Buddhist saints, deities, helpers and other interesting figures with new interpretations – these paintings create a dichotomy in the mind, as you shift between ancient and possibly future worlds.

My painting methods? Basic oil painting. I usually start with a simple, pencil sketch design that places the picture elements in their place. The colors are never part of the design - each picture generates its own color palette. Increasingly I’m using ‘earth’ (which can include plant) primary colors instead of chemical ones – like earth reds (madder, Persian) rather than cadmiums; the same with yellows. There aren’t many earth blues, but some chemical blues like manganese are soft and lovely. Greens are a swirling jungle of possibility as long as you have blues and yellows. I underpaint almost everything, building up a basic color spectrum. Then I layer and glaze over and over. I often fingerpaint, just like a child, smushing paint around and around, mixing, blending, swirling colors into each other. I let the color take over the painting naturally, never forcing it. Sometimes I drastically repaint colors many times, since each color exerts an effect on every other. Getting them to co-exist takes a lot of tweaking.

I know that a painting will eventually take on a life of its own. If I try to exert too much control, the picture fights back and goes sour. So I let it run. Sometimes an image appears and simply won’t be denied. It demands to join the painting, even if it means a lot of re-work. Coco Got Loose was like that - I had the rug, the guitars, and what seemed like a finished picture. Then Coco appeared and had to be included. Most pictures take dozens, some hundreds of hours. I’ve tried painting crude, but I always end up working a picture until I feel it’s truly finished. Good crude is hard. I admire effective crude, but I can’t make myself go in that direction. It would save a lot of time if I could.

Maybe you’ll want to join me on a mental journey. Maybe you’ll relate. If not, that’s cool. If you get drawn in for half a minute, or half an hour, and can hardly help yourself laughing, you’re in the zone. When you just can’t keep your eyes from returning to the picture, you’re in the zone. Come join the zone!