My paintings start with looking out my studio window into the yard behind my house. The light playing on and through the trees hitting the grass, and the old fence creates a closed environment for study of color coming alive. This creates a world of light, shadow, density of form and transparency of color that becomes the building blocks of my painting process. The viewing process continues all through the year: revealing a world of shifting patterns. The bleak cold whitish light of winter, the warm verdant bloom of spring, the wild contrasting light of summer, and the soft fading light of late summer and fall set up an arena of shifting rhythms of form and character that comingle and gestate in painting.

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The color, lines, planes, transparencies of paint become ideas: both physical and metaphorical, and get pushed around the canvas to make a situation that has its own sense of order, logic, and space. The rhythmic forms that develop are meant to correspond and evoke but not imitate the external world. As I work input from new classical music (Particularly Cage and Scelsi), some remembrances of the Washington Color School ( Gilliam, Davis, and Berkowitz), my ever present thought about Finnegans Wake, and our crazy political machinations wind their way into the fabric of the work in progress. The components and individual sense of the painting reveals itself as the entire surface configurations coalesce into carriers of meaning.   

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These shifting variations of form and color perform a variety of functions that act as catalysts for the viewer’s engagement in the process. The viewer’s eyes move across the surface assessing all of the materials it sees, and this gets the viewer involved with the image formation process.  Associative thoughts get implied to the viewer. The viewer can become enmeshed in the painting as the experience builds into a manifold experience that becomes richer with repeated VIEWING. The encoded material that I have developed on the canvas slips out of the paintings and goes into the viewer’s subconscious. After hanging around in the back of the viewer’s mind, the stuff pops back out as ethereal breadcrumbs for the conscious mind to nibble on. 

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