How did you get started as an artist?
I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri which deeply affected me as it did writer TS Eliott in the following: “It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river [Mississippi], which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London”. I have always been a visually oriented person, observing the world in front of me. I had thought I would be a scientist/chemist at first, as I enjoyed science lab experiments involving mixing chemicals in my youth. Then, I would soon mix chemicals in the form of paint on a palette. I would receive critique and encouragement from my family, parochial Lutheran school principal, high school football coach and my college professors, including Philip Sultz at Webster University and Richard Mayhew at Penn State University, School of Art where I had earned my MFA in painting.
The discoid is a deliberate compositional format chosen by me to unify my paintings.
What themes does your work involve?
In grad school, I was a realist painter searching for a motif that was personal and profound. This, was my family, including my mentally challenged brother Tom. I had shown a painting of my brother to painter Willem De Kooning during a studio visit in 1981 and he liked it! I then shifted to still life and the interior having worked from photographs and drawings based on them. I then explored the landscape, particularly seascape. I took a profound change of theme by exploring charcoal and pastel drawings based on rock art images I had seen and photographed in the American southwest in Utah and Nevada. I decided to work from my intuition and freeform unconscious stream of consciousness methods of mark making. From this modus operandi, I deliberately worked with thick impasto paint from small format squares, rectangles and finally circular formats which I currently work on referred to as discoid and textura.
Each painting is a spiritual adventure in direct expression of color application layers composed multi-directionally as forms emerge as seen in celestial and terrestrial nature.
What is your source of inspiration?
I may begin reviewing artists quotes such as abstract expressionist Jack Tworkov: “I wanted, and hope I arrived at, a painting style in which planning does not exclude Intuitive and random play…If I must choose between painting and ideas, I choose painting; between painting and every form of theater I choose painting.”
Thus, the act of painting, applying color, especially impasto layering is paramount to me as an artist. Excavation, purportedly, was the best painting Willem DeKooning had painted in 1950. It incorporated anthropomorphic shapes all over the canvas. It was a breakthrough painting. I have personally studied it many times at the Art Institute of Chicago permanent collection. One can see the layering and scraping effect he had created in this and other work. To excavate, one must perform an action which is to cover then to dig into, thus unearthing a substance which for me is paint.
Can you describe your creative process?
I relate to late sculptor Richard Serra’s remarkable 1967-1968 “Verb list Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself", especially to curve to lift, to inlay, to impress, to smear, to rotate, to swirl, to spread, to collect, of tension, of nature, of layering”. The process of free form painting involves another type of layering and removing thus revealing, sometimes, jewel like color. The discoid is a deliberate compositional format chosen by me to unify my paintings. Effusion refers to unrestrained expression of words or feelings which may be apropos for abstract painting. Intuitive thinking is important in this process. This is a feeling /sense not requiring the use of rational processes such as facts and data. Effective intuition comes from years of knowledge and experience. It is a truly human process requiring deep feeling. My color is applied with heavy impasto acrylic layers built up on Masonite and/or wood grounds, achieving a unified textural surface as my painting goal.
Nature has also played a part in my art having observed the Pacific Ocean’s constancy of waves off the coast of Saipan having lived and taught on this remote island in 2020.Audibly, I’ve heard the Kansas wind and see the results of it as nature bends foliage back and forth. Now, living and teaching college art near Columbus, Georgia, I live by a 550-mile-long river, the Chattahoochee whose waters flow rapidly creating dynamic whitewater effects. With these natural influences in mind,I have chosen the circular format as it contributes to my quest for an all-over abstract surface.
Thus, my recent paintings exemplify a process of wrapping or layering impasto acrylic paint on a circular format I refer to as a discoid. Instead of a brush, I use a large palette knife for these circular paintings. The palette knife is a tool which allows me to apply and press acrylic paint into the ground, using thick impasto overlapping swathes of color. There is also an excavation or removal of this paint and a transplant of another color.
When you paint in a circle or discoid format, all sectors of the painting are crucial to the composition. Someone once said the there is no corner to hide in when you work in a circular format. Color acrylic impasto layers create immediate effects of abstract color stasis and kinesis. You cannot plan this interaction, as it happens because of the process of direct color application fostered by the impasto application of paint. Colors and marks disappear and reemerge as per paint application. I do not need a palette, as my painting ground is the palette where the expression is born. Each painting is a spiritual adventure in direct expression of color application layers composed multi-directionally as forms emerge as seen in celestial and terrestrial nature.
Do you have any artistic goals for the future that you would like to share?
I plan to continue for some time to come, to work in this circular or tondo format. I have begun incorporating burlap and other collage elements in my personal expressive paintings. Each painting is unique in both color and execution.
