Artist Statement
In my mid thirties, I was dealing with some annoying health problems that were hard to shake. At that point I began to make person size blue paintings, thinking that blue was the color I needed to be immersed in, in order to heal. It was that simple and I think it actually worked.. Color has always been a soulmate, a primary force in how I see the world and in turn express my deepest stirrings.
That immersion in blue was when that color really entered my work in a meaningful way. Up until that point I think green and red seemed to hold places of primacy in my practice. Maybe it is also an age thing. Blues allow for a slower reading, somehow pairing with maturing/maturity, while red can pack a fast punch especially when teamed with green. (All this of course depends on what all of these colors are in relation to, in a given work of art). The fact of the matter is color is a kind of soulmate to me and when I am in its thrall, I am in a good space, mentally and psychically.
Since my “discovery of blue,” way back when, I have returned to variations of it again and again throughout my career as an artist.
While my recent exhibition, Kind of Blue, was not exclusively blue in content, the larger mostly blue paintings felt like a kind of anchor for the other works in the show, attesting to the fact that I am ever trying to plumb the depths of blue, in all its facets.
I come at my work from different angles. My collages allow me to feel like a kid in a sandbox. They can consume my attention for hours on end while I move around pieces of colored papers, in various relationships to each other, usually with the rule that in the end there should be a rectangular composition whose structure is based on the relationships of colored parts to each other and the entire rectangle, in a way that feels mysteriously right and true.
The rectangle, or square, and the composition that is in it is an essential part of what is important to me. This should be particularly evident in my black and white drawings which are emphatically about search for strong composition and within that a sense of spatiality, which is to say, expansive space and its relation to the compressed space of the rectangle, which is to say a search for and involvement in the poetry of space.. The edges of a given composition are seriously considered as I figure out how to create a container of space that is unified and works as a whole. Much of this way of thinking comes from my love of Modernism and what I learned at the NY Studio School in the late 70s while studying with extraordinary teachers who in turn had been students of Hans Hofmann.
I also work on transcriptions. They have long been an important part of my investigations. They allow me to dig deeply into the work of great artists from the past and they inform my art. Often I will work from a master and end up with pieces that are pared down from the original or changed in significant ways. Sometimes the basic structure of the source will remain essential to a given piece, while the color and other elements are significantly changed. Often this practice will inform my other works in ways I am not even conscious of. The transcriptions can appear more obviously figurative than much of my more abstract work, including my mostly purely abstract collages, but it all comes together somehow as one. It is like many branches coming off one tree trunk. While I circle around different vantage points, they eventually all come together at the internal center.
December 27, 2025
In my mid thirties, I was dealing with some annoying health problems that were hard to shake. At that point I began to make person size blue paintings, thinking that blue was the color I needed to be immersed in, in order to heal. It was that simple and I think it actually worked.. Color has always been a soulmate, a primary force in how I see the world and in turn express my deepest stirrings.
That immersion in blue was when that color really entered my work in a meaningful way. Up until that point I think green and red seemed to hold places of primacy in my practice. Maybe it is also an age thing. Blues allow for a slower reading, somehow pairing with maturing/maturity, while red can pack a fast punch especially when teamed with green. (All this of course depends on what all of these colors are in relation to, in a given work of art). The fact of the matter is color is a kind of soulmate to me and when I am in its thrall, I am in a good space, mentally and psychically.
Since my “discovery of blue,” way back when, I have returned to variations of it again and again throughout my career as an artist.
While my recent exhibition, Kind of Blue, was not exclusively blue in content, the larger mostly blue paintings felt like a kind of anchor for the other works in the show, attesting to the fact that I am ever trying to plumb the depths of blue, in all its facets.
I come at my work from different angles. My collages allow me to feel like a kid in a sandbox. They can consume my attention for hours on end while I move around pieces of colored papers, in various relationships to each other, usually with the rule that in the end there should be a rectangular composition whose structure is based on the relationships of colored parts to each other and the entire rectangle, in a way that feels mysteriously right and true.
The rectangle, or square, and the composition that is in it is an essential part of what is important to me. This should be particularly evident in my black and white drawings which are emphatically about search for strong composition and within that a sense of spatiality, which is to say, expansive space and its relation to the compressed space of the rectangle, which is to say a search for and involvement in the poetry of space.. The edges of a given composition are seriously considered as I figure out how to create a container of space that is unified and works as a whole. Much of this way of thinking comes from my love of Modernism and what I learned at the NY Studio School in the late 70s while studying with extraordinary teachers who in turn had been students of Hans Hofmann.
I also work on transcriptions. They have long been an important part of my investigations. They allow me to dig deeply into the work of great artists from the past and they inform my art. Often I will work from a master and end up with pieces that are pared down from the original or changed in significant ways. Sometimes the basic structure of the source will remain essential to a given piece, while the color and other elements are significantly changed. Often this practice will inform my other works in ways I am not even conscious of. The transcriptions can appear more obviously figurative than much of my more abstract work, including my mostly purely abstract collages, but it all comes together somehow as one. It is like many branches coming off one tree trunk. While I circle around different vantage points, they eventually all come together at the internal center.
December 27, 2025