“Cityscape”
Oil/panel with tape and paper additions
24” x 40”
2021
“Space Needle”
Oil, paper, newspaper and magazine pictures
16” x 10”
2002
“100% Natural”. 2 versions
Oil and paper/ panel
18” x 12”
1994
Conceptual art is probably the best named category of art. Abstract art is not abstract at all. In fact it is the most concrete of all styles. It is what it is…paint on a surface. Baroque Art is not rough by today’s standards. And Impressionist Art is not about impressions, at least that wasn’t the intention of the artists who made Impressionist art. And certainly Cubist Art is not about cubes. But Conceptual Art is art presented as a concept. Or Art about concepts.
This is diptych about a concept that was hotly debated in the early 1990’s when I made it … that homosexual art was natural. To me it already seems hopelessly retardaire to be debating this in 1990. Hadn’t we figured this out by then? Certainly in my circles it was laughably outdated to think of homosexual desire to be unnatural. But here we are today 30 years later still debating it in some circles and even outlawing it in some countries.
Meanwhile, the craving for all things natural from the clothes we wore to the breakfast cereal we ate was just getting fired up. And now, unlike many trends that come and go, this one has only gotten stronger. Maybe it’s because those 100% percent natural cereals weren’t natural at all and still aren’t. In the same way, the images I clipped from pornographic magazines meant to inspire either homosexual or heterosexual desire in men aren’t very natural either. And our awareness of just how unhealthy pornography can be has become more obvious over time just as pornography has become more onerous and ubiquitous.
Here’s the thing about conceptual art that is so disappointing to me. It doesn’t work. Implied in its very name is the intention that one will “get” the concept. And perhaps equally implied is the further notion that having “gotten” it one will be more aware and perhaps even change or expand one’s mind about the concept presented. But that never happens.
No homophobic person ever changed their mind about homosexuality being natural as a result of seeing my conceptual art … and not just because it’s been in the closet all this time. And just as bad, most conceptual art is deliberately visually unappealing for some reason. It’s as though there is a fear shared among artists that one’s concepts would be sullied by looking good…or god forbid…beautiful…itself a concept that has been almost universally held in reproach by the art establishment for most of my adult life.
Art that is meant to be aesthetically pleasing works…at least some of the time with some of the people. And the degree to which it works is the degree to which we would admire it. Not so with conceptual art. The more obscure the concept, the more a certain cadre of the artist and his or her friends will admire it. Which in turn requires a lengthy bit of wall text to explain it to befuddled onlookers.
And here we are. I have just written the twenty first century version of wall text to explain these paintings. And I would argue that this writing is far more lucid and compelling than my collages will ever be no matter how long you stare at them.
“Third Eye”
Ink/paper
8.5″ x 11”
1994
Charcoal/paper
8.5″ x 11”
1994
Pencil & MEK/paper
8.5″ x 11”
1994
“Abstract Collage” 3 Versions
Oil/Paper
20″ x 18″
1994
Two artists worth considering are the nearly household name Henri Matisse and the lesser known Robert Motherwell. Henry and Bob. French and American. Early and then mid 20th century. I learned a lot from both of these artists. Among other things, I learned how to boil it down.
In this case, it’s boiled down so much I don’t even know what the subject might have been at one point. Maybe there never was a subject. I do create lots of abstract paintings after all. But it does seem to suggest a figure in front of a landscape. Or a portrait in front of a window. The terms of the piece are few enough to count without much effort. Is that the ocean and a night sky? Or just a blue wall with a heavy shadow. Is that the bridge of a nose or just the way the paper tore?
It probably doesn’t matter. But these peekaboo games can be enjoyable, to a point. Like all things aesthetic, when that line is crossed from pleasantly engaging to annoyingly puzzling is a fine line to distinguish. One man’s aesthetic pleasures is another man’s befuddlement. Hard to know where we are here. Something tells me, though, it’s worth keeping around for awhile.
“We Covered A Lot of Ground Today”
Chemical lift
11” x 8.5”
1993
This little piece was so far of its time for me as an artist and maybe for what was going on in the culture. It is a parody of male and female stereotypes. And it’s a comment on both advertising and accepted ideas about artistic styles.
It is a collage … of sorts. I took pages from a magazine and dissolved the images on to paper using chemicals readily available at a hardware store. One is from a cigarette ad for Marlboro cigarettes and the other is from a pornographic magazine. The title is from the ad. It takes on a kind of visual linguistic pun by virtue of the juxtaposition of the images. The arrangement and the way they are combined is its own comment on both abstract expressionism ala Robert Rauschenberg and the deliberate meaningless of David Salle’s post modernist work.
I did a painting of this piece which was stolen by an art dealer. Fortunately years later I was able to recover it. That piece is 6’ x 4’ and one of my favorite pieces.
Painting by David Salle 
Robert Rauschenberg, Buffalo II, 1964
“Landscape, symbol and figure”
Oil and dissolved media ink on paper
11” x 8.5”
1993
“Types”
Torn magazine ads
12” x 18”
1989
I created this collage in 1989, long after the invention of collage nearly 80 years prior. But I am writing this citation and adding this collage to my website in 2024 nearly 35 years after I made it. I’m grateful to the pioneers of collage and the artists who pioneered the idea of ready made art all of whom made it easier for me to decide that combining these two ads taken from a magazine could be considered art.
At the time I thought it was interesting that the idea of the beautiful young Madonna type could be seen alongside the beautiful young Adonis figure in popular culture. These were archetypes that we were supposed to aspire towards. It seemed oversimplified to me even then. Little did I know that the idea of binary gender roles would become one of the most compelling questions for the generations that followed.
“Gaze”
Oil and solvents on paper
12” x 9”
1988
These days one can read a lot about the male gaze. And … if you dig a little deeper you can also find a little about the female gaze. The whole idea is that there is something implicitly lascivious and therefore wrong about a man looking at an attractive and or nude woman in art. This is predicated on the idea that this diminishes the observed woman somehow. The conventional wisdom is that this objectifies the woman and worse, reduces her to a commodity or simply an aspect of the observer’s satisfaction.
I’ve never really accepted these positions. And since I am a male artist I’m not really in a position to speak up. But, since this is my website showing my art I feel compelled to say that I have healthy dynamic relationships with women in many capacities. I have a daughter, female employees, a girlfriend, platonic female friends and acquaintances at places I frequent. I don’t look at any of them as sources of sexual satisfaction even in the act of just looking. And I manage this even while hanging my walls with paintings that include images of nude women some of whom are in deliberately sexualized positions. I also use porn in the privacy of my bedroom at night. None of this has sullied my relationships with the many wonderful women in my life. In fact, I would argue that having nude female art would help males who may be included to objectify women to stop doing that. I can’t prove this theory but intuitively it makes sense to me. Perhaps someone will do a study of this one day. Because we live in a culture where there is little or no definition of what is art, it will be difficult to establish an excepted definition of art to build this study on. Still, I think it would yield some surprising results. My hypothesis is that looking at nude art cultivates a higher respect for whatever is depicted whether that is nude women, nude men, landscapes or wildlife.