“Puna”
Oil/panel
30” x 24”
2018
In 2018 I spent a lot of time in Hawaii helping my friend Dwight maintain his vacation properties on the big Island. When I was not working on fixing a roof or chopping back the jungle I was painting. Despite the heat and bugs, zero artificial lighting and lack of proper sanitation I was able to create a lot of work.
The work was mostly inspired by landscape but was essentially abstract. The rich dark red and brown of new lava contrasted starkly with the dense green jungle. And the ragged organic lines and textures of riotous nature against man’s attempts to carve out pockets of order and comfort were an unending source of inspiration to me.
“Kilauea”
Oil/panel
11” x 8”
2018
In 2018 Mt. Kilauea erupted. One of my best friends owns property on the long gentle slopes of this shield volcano on the eastern side of Hawaii’s largest and namesake Island. I had planned to visit him anyway as so went to help support him in anyway I could. Fortunately his property was spared. And I got to be part of a major slow moving geologic event.
Fortunately I was able to set up a basic studio there and made some beautiful pieces inspired by the obvious and not so obvious forces at work there.
Hawaii: The Big Island
They are all oil/panel
Various sizes
2018
“Roller Paintings”
Oil/paper
8.5″ x 11”
Dated by month and year on the painting
For over 20 years I have spent a little time doing these small works on paper almost every month. They are intimate works that often have some of my best ideas about painting. Some are beautiful and worthy of framing. Others are at best “interesting.” And some just go in the garbage or re-cycle bin.
There are too many to put even a small fraction on the website. So here is a sample that gives some idea of what they look like.
They are created with a variety of tools including brayers. Brayers are rollers that are used in the print making business. Usually the ink is rolled onto a stone or plate which is then pushed through a printing press where paper is squeezed onto the wet ink on the plate. Here, I skip that step and use the tools to simply roll the paint directly onto the paper. The result is that it looks a little like a print but there is no printing. I’m simply using a brayer to paint with, applying the paint directly to the paper.
These are all one of a kind.
Sometimes I also use spray paint, brushes, found objects and even my shoe and my nose to make marks directly on the paper.
They are all signed and dated with the month and year.
“Beijing Suite”
Oil/ink/paper
8.5” x 11”
2015
I often create small works on paper with whatever materials I have on hand when I travel. These paintings were done on a tiny coffee table in a little apartment in Beijing, often with my 16 year old son sitting nearby watching or making his own drawings. They build on my well established habit of using rollers and found objects to roll and smear paint on to the paper. And as usual, they suggest landscape space.
In many of these pieces I also used tree leaves as elements in the paintings. I did not adhere the leaves to the paper. Instead I rolled paint onto the leaves and then used them as a stamp. Or laid the leaf on the paper and rolled over it which left a paint shadow after the leaf was removed.
The paintings included here are a sample of what was created during the three months my son and I were living in Beijing. The rest are carefully archived in my studio. These works, like most that I do on paper, are not necessarily meant to be framed and hung on the wall. Instead, they were intended to be enjoyed as a folio, taken down from the shelf, looked at while having tea or a glass of wine and then put away.
“Brown Abstract”
Oil/panel
48 x 32”
2012
This was one of the last paintings I did at my notorious studio under I-5 where I painted and sometimes lived for 20 years.
All I will say is that it’s even more gorgeous in real life than here on the computer. It’s just pure eye candy with the slightest dab of intellectual depth.
I love it.
Just for fun I tried to copy it. Not surprisingly that didn’t work out so well. But it was an interesting experiment.
“Blue Hawaii”
Oil/panel
30” x 24”
2012
When I am not sure if a painting is any good or not I hang it over the toilet in my studio bathroom. This may not sound very flattering but in fact 2 times a day, sometimes more, I go in there with intentions other than looking at art. And as such, I need to stand there and look at whatever is in front of me for a few minutes.
It usually doesn’t take long for me to realize a piece is either much better and more interesting than I thought, or something that should be flushed down the toilet with whatever else is going that way. Perhaps it’s because of the “unexpected” moment of going to the bathroom, preparing for one’s business and then looking up in a moment of relief, there is an opportunity for clarity.
Maybe this very thing could be a topic for a TED talk or a graduate thesis. Maybe this doesn’t work for others. But it is a very effective way for me to get a fresh look at something. I suspect I am not the only one who makes decisions about important matters in the bathroom.
“The Last I-5 Painting”
Oil/panel
20” x 14”
2012
I worked hard for 20 years in the same small warehouse studio underneath the Interstate Highway that cuts right through Seattle. It was essentially a cave. And I labored away in the service of the gift, creating thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs. It was also the birthplace and home to several experiential artistic experiments and exhibitions including the weekly First Church of Art services on Wednesday nights, a speak easy Internet café and the Little Red Studio just to name a few. That studio, and all that went on there, would really be the stuff of a very fat book.
After 20 years it was time to go. Somehow, in the midst of a massive purge and packing campaign that went on for months, I managed to eke out this little painting on panel. It is the last painting I did in that studio and felt very much like the way I imagine I will feel when I am making the last painting before I die.
It’s a modest painting in size and ambition. It depicts me as little more than a tiny lump reaching upwards in what appears to be an effort to make a mark on an easel in a studio that has itself become night. The sky around the studio seems to swallow everything into its various shades of dark blue blurring boundaries and making everything increasingly apart of one vibrating blue universe.
I loved that studio. But it was indeed, time to move on. I left with a feeling of completion and like I had really sucked the very marrow out of every bone of opportunity that the space and time in that studio offered. When I look at this painting it reminds me to live that way now so that when I leave this place I can do so with the same mixture of satisfaction, completeness and humility. That is, what I hope to feel, when it’s time for me to do my last painting on this earth.
“Urban Watershed”
Oil/panel
7’ x 4’
2010 or 2011
The title “Urban Watershed” was given by my good friend and writer Scott Exell. He used this term to refer to all of my abstract work done at that time.
And I like it. It works in some hard to define poetic way. And maybe that’s why it works…the hard to define part. The pieces are also hard to define. Are they landscape paintings or just smears of paint on a panel? If they are landscapes they are on the one hand rather drab, even a touch bleak. And yet, at the same time, they are elegant and dare I say even a touch beautiful.
In this case, even more than others done at the same time, I was experimenting with a squeegee and pulling skeins of paint over top of other paint. And using the roller like one would use a house painting roller, with repeated rolling until the irregularities were largely blended together.
To me, the result is unquestionably landscape and climatic. For purists this may be a disappointment, a falling short of a rigorous purity of approach. That line of thinking held such sway over me in my 20’s (I was 50 or so when I painted this). Any hint of landscape would have been shamefully obliterated.
That old line of thinking just seems laughable at this point. In front of the beauty of this piece it makes me wonder now, at 62, what other silly notions am I hanging on to that may have served a purpose at one point but now would be best left behind, like the cicadas outside my window rubbing their wings together to make music, their wings freed from the protective husk that kept them safe underground but which they left behind as they ascended to higher things: music and flight…and mating!
A watershed suggests a direction … maybe even a change of direction or a line in the sand. It’s a kind of blend of decision making and inevitability. From this point on the water will flow in that direction. And one can not fight gravity. In a way Scott was right. From that point on my art flowed effortlessly and decisively in this direction…freer and with an unabashed love of landscape and climate.
“La Pension Commission”
Oil/Canvas
48″x60″
2011
First, here is a little background for how this painting came to be. During this time I had a friend who owned a cute little Pension in the heart of downtown Seattle. It had a quaint lobby overlooking Puget Sound with 2 large windows and a spacious blank wall between them. The views out the window were an endless display of clouds, mountains and sea reflecting light in a myriad of color. But at night, the glare of the windows made it nearly impossible to see anything outside and as such the blank wall became conspicuous. It cried out for a painting that carried something of the grand vistas of daytime with the amber cozy interior space of night.
At this time my abstract work was developing quickly. Each piece seemed to be a breakthrough in techniques and lusciousness. When I finished this piece I felt like it was the best thing I had ever done. And I knew it was the beginning of a whole new pleasurable way for me to make a painting. Little did I know that my world was about to crash and I would be without a studio for 5 years while I rebuilt. The outpouring of juicy landscapy concept pieces would have to wait.
“Black Abstract”
Oil/Panel
4′ x 4’
2011
These pieces represent a moment when I started using the rollers I generally use on smaller works on paper, on large paintings. These pieces are also inspired by my enjoyment of walking or driving at night. I love the mysterious sense of space and the patterns of silhouettes created by banks of trees, ridge lines and even urban formations. There is also a creamy smooth feeling about the blackness of night.
I think that feeling of smoothness is the result of the intersection of my visual input and imagination. I have often heard artists talk about synesthesia which is the blending of sound and sight. But for me my sense of sight more often blends with the sense of touch when I am outside at night. The darkness almost always seems cool and smooth. These pieces come close to communicating that sensation.
