“Toie”
Oil/panel
24” x 24”
2025
This could also be titled, “The Accidental Portrait of Toie.” I didn’t intend to paint her portrait. But there she is. A remarkable likeness of my friend. My intention was to create a vocabulary of marks that would allow me to paint figures and objects in an “in between” space. In between realism and symbolism and in between realistic and abstract. And finally, in between sculptural space and landscape space.
And maybe, in between someone specific and a type.
Girl with a Pearl Earing by Johannes Vermeer
Girl with a Pearl Earing by Johannes Vermeer
“Toei: The Girl Who Looked like the girl in the famous painting”
Oil/panel
14” x 10”
2025.
When I first painted on this panel a woman appeared that looked a lot like my friend Toei. She is a sweet Thai woman with large eyes and a doleful look. She didn’t pose for the painting. She appeared there.
But my goal was to paint a portrait that was fundamentally integrated into a serious of overlapping and inconsistent landscape spaces. Not a representation of my friend.
Well, it also looks a bit like the woman in a famous painting by Vermeer, a 16th century Dutch painter. The painting is called “The Girl with a Pearl Earing.” It was made famous by a book and movie adaptation a few years ago. This is a happy coincidence but does not reflect my intention to comment on art history in general or this painting in particular. I wasn’t even attempting to add depth to the painting’s meaning by quoting a famous painting.
Still, it does invite certain comparisons and ask interesting questions about the connection between paintings at different times and the value, if any, of their connections and similarities.
“A Newish Portrait of Dorian Gray”
Oil/panel
14” x 10”
2025
For most of my art career and even when I was a college student it has been held that important artists were ones that created a new way of constructing a painting and often had a technique that was also new in some way. But baked into the concept of “new” was the overriding implication that this would make it possible for other artists to then make art in that new vernacular that was more relevant and representative of their time. The inference being that those would be less significant artists and were in fact often left to the dust bin of history.
Occasionally one of these lesser “copycat” artists, or worse, an artist with a pension for painting in an old way which was referred to as having “old masteritis” would be dug up from the basement and given a proper showing and often very popular among the rank and file.
These shows would be panned by the art world and eventually the artist would be properly returned to obscurity.
What has struck me about many of these shows is that the artists in question often have highly developed and easily recognizable skill. The works are often skillfully done and often quite memorable in emotional impact. What they lack was something significantly innovative in style and vision.
I value and appreciate innovation as much as any art world snob. And mostly agree with the way the Western Canon of art history is laid out other than issues of exclusion of women. But I now question the degree of emphasis on innovation both in art and in our culture as a whole. As I write this we are entering an era where it seems to me the pace of change has driven the culture to grow in ways that it can not handle. And part of the problem is the level of innovation celebrated as an end in itself without regard to many other concerns.
When Renaissance artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo created their seminal works, the art was not new simply for the sake of being new, they were deeply concerned about integrating Classical Greek thought with deeply felt Christian beliefs. This was seriously urgent to them and their patrons.
When Picasso and others of the late 19th and early 20th century were inventing their personal isms, it wasn’t just about being new for newness sake, although that was beginning to be part of the recipe, it was about liberating the individual from various kinds of tyranny, political and artistic. Napoleon and the art academy had a very tight hold on people during the 19th century even as industry and more readily available capital were liberating people.
For nearly all of my adult life I have puzzled over these issues. And each time I arrive at similar points. I do value innovation in large and small ways. I value and understand the importance of consistency and measured change. I understand and value the iconoclastic but at the same time I also see the value of skill and connection to one’s past. And that ultimately my highest goal is to find some balance of the these seemingly opposed sets of concerns.
And that is what this portrait is. It’s not completely new. It’s still a painting. And it looks like a person and various overlapping landscapes. It exhibits skill as well as apparent carelessness. It’s a little cubist. It’s a little abstract expressionist. It’s a little realistic. But it’s also measured, balanced and even a little backward facing.
It’s not entirely new. It’s newish.
“Self Portrait”
Oil/panel
32” x 18”
2024
I painted this in my little studio on the ground floor of my friend’s house in Pattaya Thailand. The colors are clearly influenced by the light of this south Thailand tropical city by the ocean. The sky is often hazy and pale. And the earth is rusty red. The layering and obfuscation of my face is hardly a new thing in my painting. But making it there, in the sweaty makeshift studio amidst the grist and grime of Thailand’s adult entertainment capital gave it new resonance.
“Yaya?”
Oil/panel
24” x 18”
2024
Many times when I paint a portrait without a model it ends up looking like somebody in my life. This time it looks like my host’s roommate. But that isn’t the interesting part about this piece. What interests me more is how the face is obscured by the roughly applied paint around and even over the face. I do regret waiting until the portrait was dry before applying the heavy black. By the time you read this there may be a second version of this painting with the face and the heavy black more integrated.
“Lulu at 18”
Oil on canvas
50” x 48”
2023
Lulu is my daughter. Our relationship is complex, tight and mostly gentle. Despite not having any of my genetic makeup she and I are more similar in many ways than my son. We are both emotionally intuitive, goofy, creative in the fabric of our day and able to be patient and compassionate with others…characteristics that don’t fit as easily on Sam. We are also both left handed. That may not mean anything but I think it suggests something.
Some paintings are more manifestly for oneself. It can be argued that any really good painting is just for oneself. But in my case, that is often not the case. There are often other forces at play in varying degrees. I often have audiences other than myself in mind when I do a painting. In the most extreme case, a commercial commission where I might even detest the results. Fortunately I have not been in a financial condition that required such prostitution of my talents more than a very few times in my career. The banjo playing chickens in a pizzeria south of Seattle are a particularly detestable record of one such occasion.
Here I was completely free of any motivation other than to express my view of my daughter at this moment in her life. Like any good father, I see my daughter at yet another beautiful moment in her journey of unfolding as an individual. It is both awkward and confident. There is swagger yet fragility. The obvious affected clothes and body language belie her journey of becoming herself. And it is these juxtapositions that give me hope that she is indeed on a journey…not stuck in a rut or working too hard to become someone else’s vision of who she is or ought to be.
People ask me what Lulu thinks of the painting. Well, Lulu hasn’t seen it. It was done from photos that I took in the most offhanded way. The photos were taken in an offhanded way not in an effort to conceal from her that I was going to do a painting. No, that’s just the way pictures are taken these days….one handed, from a device not devoted to picture taking and with hardly any effort to compose the shot. In fact, when I took the pictures I had no thought of making a painting.
It was only later when I looked at the photos did I realize I had inadvertently found a congealed moment of truth about Lulu. Then, I leaned into my respect for the portraiture of French painter Ingre to arrange the composition to add an element of structure and durability. I nurtured the edge qualities to add spatial depth and emotional complexity. And I took some inspiration from Matisse in adjusting the colors to add frizzle. It might sound like I was making soup but in fact the process of doing the painting was more like a deep meditation on Lulu and my relationship with her at this pivotal moment in her life: eighteen and first year of college.
I have no desire to show Lulu the painting. Nor have I made any effort to hide it from her. In fact, she has walked right past it on several occasions without noticing it. Or perhaps she has noticed it and decided not to comment. In any case, it’s my hope that at some point in the future she will discover the painting. And that it will help her take the measure of who she is at that time…the way coming across old photos of oneself does….or more significantly….the way sitting down with an old friend that we haven’t seen in a long time often does.
In the meantime this painting is for me. I have already had several moments where I was able to sit and enjoy the painting. It does it’s job of holding Lulu in a clear yet delicate way. And perhaps it will do it’s job for Lulu in the future. It is, like many things I have done for her, a quiet unobtrusive investment in her future…her future as a self actualized aware and whole human being.
“Judas”. Unfinished.
Oil/panel
6’ x 4’
2023.
Why this?
Why a gigantic slightly feminized gigantic black man’s ass? And why would a straight white male artist want this? Who is my muse?. What inspires me to pick this and paint it so large? And why such an unabashedly realistic, almost illustration level way of painting?
Well, at some level I don’t care who my muse is or why I chose to paint this or even why I painted it this way. The short answer is because I simply had to. And that is not just romantic hyperbole. This is one of those images I just had to get out from the moment I saw the photos.
It’s a compulsion. Almost a biological urge.
But this is an essay about my art and my process so I will try to dig deeper. First of all, the model is a new friend. Sthey is very knowledgeable on world religions and mythologies, is an avid burlesque performer with the motivation to design stheir own shows and is a lot of fun. Sthey is also gorgeous.
On another level I want to celebrate stheir commitment to gender bending presentations in stheir artistic presentations. This is clearly an issue of our times as is the matter of his race. The fact that Judas is Black is one of the least interesting things about sthem as a friend. But the fact that the subject of my painting here is Black is important to me. I have heard from many, including Jules, that there are not enough Black artists and Black bodies represented in the arts. I absolutely agree. Obviously I can’t change my race to help remedy this, but I can certainly paint a gorgeous Black person in the most luscious and honoring way that I can.
Yes, these issues are my muse in that they are playing a part in inspiring this piece. But so is my friend. Knowing sthey would see this at some point and hopefully would be honored and flattered and just plain tickled so see stheir physical being as well as stheir artistry painted so beautifully and stridently inspired me to make this piece.
At the time of writing this essay, this painting is not finished. Here are some pics of its progress from a blank canvas. When I finish it I will add a final larger photo.
