Artist Statement

“Out Post” 20″x10″

Regarding the “Land Treasures” Series:

A change in environment transforms my painting.  When I return to the studio and start to work I will begin a new abstract painting differently.  Invariably, unpremeditated color, shape and light quality appear characteristic of the place I have recently visited.  I know the painting is finished when its image gives me a sense of that place.  The finished work shows me aspects of a place that have affected me most.

“Laughter Shock” 18″x18″

The paintings in the “Land Treasures” series are in response to late winter in the Arizona desert.  I began these paintings with large brush strokes of interior latex which gave the canvases a sweep of space from the start.  To focus the images I used acrylic paint rather than oils for the first time.  Focusing the images was sharper with the acrylic.  I could work more quickly and with less investment while at the same time more deeply into the development of the images.  As the images formed I could see they were land inspired but clearly, not landscapes.  Rather than topography I had been impressed by a sense of deep rock.

“Deeper Pool” 20″x10″

I’ve decided that these paintings are images of what we imagine, know or suspect is hidden deep in the earth on which we walk.  Inspiration abounds and holds fast.  Prospectors lured by buried treasure, were seduced by the raw, rough and very, very deep beauty of the Arizona desert and the lushness of the soft undulating California hills.  These gamblers devised a fit language for the drilling of oil and mining of gold.  Imaginative and compellingly romantic, their words veiled danger, calamity and great loss.  With their poetry I’ve entitled the paintings of the “Land Treasures” series.

We treasure that which is beneath the beauty we gaze over, walk and dream upon: oil, gold, diamonds, coal, salt.   Deeply hidden are pressures we fear, seismic and some of our own invention: contradictions (to us) in the landscape.

Oil, diamonds and real estate are current concerns:  war for oil, blood for diamonds, anything for California real estate.  Intensity of desire has inspired great feats with heartbreaking loss in the gain.  The beauty is enhanced by the risk

October, 2007