Artist Biography

My BWG (Black, White & Gray) paintings use Ivory Black and Titanium White acrylics applied with a variety of brushes on pre-stretched canvases.  By attenuating color I initially sought to push composition and constrict tonal range.  However, by energetically blending and diluting the paints, I discovered a wider spectrum of tones.  I think this improvisational discovery gives the work a surprisingly expressive palette for monochrome paintings.

Armed with number two pencils, ballpoint pens and oil based sharpies, and a simple mathematical algorithm for the foundational lines, I format each composition directly onto canvas.  I then layer, wash, smear, daub, strip, add, remove and (sometimes) sand the acrylics in a variety of tones and viscosities to heighten, soften, elide, expose, flatten, blur, compress, stretch and delineate sections of the work.  Sometimes I add crushed charcoal and graphite in a water based slurry.  To highlight, segment and/or integrate compositional elements, I overwrite the foundational lines with sharpies, pencils and pens.  This final step helps define, and make more explicit, the painting's provinces and domains, and balances (or counterbalances) elements of the finished canvasses.

With formal structures and traditions, visual and temporal compression, extension and refraction, dissolution and reorganization, and by aligning and de-aligning geometric forms (lines) and polymorphic shapes, the paintings reference human and social boundaries, and address dueling tensions of order and chaos, liberation and constraint, subjugation and freedom.  To underscore these tensions I will often flatten layers to amplify the natural two-dimensionality of paint on canvas.  And like wind driven ripples across the surface of a lake, the paintings can express both movement and stillness in ways not always seen in abstract compositions.

Doing the work has been both refuge and therapy, and has given me some tools to see and experience the world in new ways.  In reflecting upon my past, I confess to being both envious and dismissive of artists and the creative process of making art.  I saw them as unserious and often self-centered people, pursuing frivolous and lesser aims than the rest of us working stiffs.  But I was wrong.  Making art is for everyone.  And partnered with nature, social connections, purpose & physical intimacy, making art is central to health and wellbeing.

If my paintings engage and evoke your feelings, thoughts & ideas, then they've hit the mark.  Interesting and provocative art engages all our senses.  I hope my paintings do that for you,.  For me the BWG series is a distillation of my own feelings, thoughts, personal history and ideas (some fully baked, some half-baked) within a complex, terrible, beautiful and at times disordered world.  And, the work itself is a joyful pursuit.

Good.  Bad.  Or otherwise.  I'd love to know what you think and how they make you feel.