Poly Esther”
Oil/panel
30” x 24”
2025
I painted this in my studio in southern Thailand. It is definitely influenced by the intense green of the tropical landscape around me and the hauntingly beautiful and heavily masked women is see here. I gave it this title because an American friend said it reminded him of the character by that name in the movies of David Lynch.
And while that is kinda fun, it distracts from the more engaging aspects of this piece. If you look carefully at the piece you can see it is held together compositionally by varying ways the paint is applied as well as the bold drawing. It’s also held together by at least 3 different kinds of space: the illusion of landscape space, the illusion of sculptural volume and the flat blank space of the panel it’s painted on.
But what is really exciting for me about this piece is that it’s a breakthrough piece that opens up a lot of creative possibilities. There are many images for portraits pouring through behind this one. All of them built on these ways of making a painting.
“Legs”
Oil/panel
28” x 36”
2024 and 1993
I started this painting in 1993. One day, in 2024, I decided to cut the top off and make a few adjustments. Admittedly it’s a weird little painting and I don’t know if it’s worth keeping or not. But I put it hear because I recently read a wonderful account of a man who sat for a portrait by one of my favorite artists Lucien Freud. The book is called The Man With the Blue Scarf which is also the name of the painting.
The book is an insightful account of the author’s experience as a model and of many of Frued’s working methods and ideas about art. But something he said that Freud talked about on several occaission made me laugh and question his authenticity. He talked about why he worked the way he did to avoid repeating himself. He apparently lived in a kind of quiet dread of repeating himself as an artist. Well, I would argue that is exactly what he did. His mature painting period which is widely considered to be about a 30 year stretch from about age 60 to his death almost 30 years later. And aside from the fact that he used different models in a wide variety of positions, they are essentially the same. I don’t mention that as a criticism at all. In fact I admire his persistence and commitment to his purpose. But compared to the wild swings and seeming unending churn of utterly different stuff I create, there is no comparison. Ironically, while I too don’t want to endlessly repeat myself, I don’t worry about it much. New things just pop up all the time. Perhaps that’s why I admire Freud’s consistency so much.
That said, as random as this image may appear, you could argue it is once again me trying to harmonize the illusion of the sculptural aspect of the figure on a flat plane. And trying to make the area of the canvas that is not the figure become more than a backdrop, but instead, a dynamic space that is both flat and atmospheric.
“Self Portrait in Hell with Alien Fetus”
Oil/panel
30” x 20”
2025
I painted this on my 64th birthday. And while I started the painting with no intention of it being a self portrait, it is undoubtably me. The alien fetus more or less appeared by itself. One little black dot and it was obvious what it was. But why? It certainly looks grim. But I don’t feel that way. The disconnect between how I feel and what I paint has never bothered me. In fact, it is intriguing to me that things come out in the most unpredictable ways.
What I like about this piece is not the grimness but the contrast between the red intensity in the middle with the green landscape space around it.
“The Collaborative Self Portrait”
Oil/panel
12” x 9”
1990 and 2024
Is it really a self portrait if someone else helps paint it?
Here is how it happened. Way back in the early 1990’s I had a studio even while I was an administrator at Seattle University. I was the Director of International Student services. And as such I worked with students from all over the world. Since one of my responsibilities was to encourage International students and American students to mingle and create friendships, I invited anyone who was interested to come paint in my studio on Wednesday nights. Since many of them didn’t know what to paint I left a basket of my drawings on a table that they could use as sources of inspiration. One student from Japan was particularly interested in my sketches and did many paintings from them including this self portrait. It is one of the few she left behind.
Years later it was badly scratched and battered so I decided to add my own paint to freshen it up. I followed her lead but also definitely made it my own again. Still, I consider this a collaborative piece. I regret that I don’t remember her name.
Not so incidentally it is painted on a piece of paneling from dormitory doors that were discarded during a renovation project while I was there. Of course I couldn’t let those panels go to waste so several students and I pulled them from a discard pile and loaded them on my old pickup. I don’t think dumpster diving was a sanctioned activity by the university, but we had a fun doing it and saved a truck load of refuse from going to the landfill. We painted on those panels for years.
“The Rat?”
Oil/canvas
30” x 24”
2023
This piece emerged from a mess and an accident and I suspect a touch of poison.
A few months ago I bought a painting at a Salvation Army. It was a portrait of a woman. I kept it for awhile but eventually decided to paint over it. I covered it with red and black paint. I laid it down and stood it up intermittently until the paint thinner dried.
Later I rubbed off some of the paint and lightly painted in the face which is much smaller than the portrait I obliterated. I accentuated the drooping breasts that flank the portrait. Then added a few finger prints beside the head.
The same day I painted it I found a dead rat in front of my studio. It was large and flattened from a car tire. There was no blood, I assume because it had rained hard all night. The site of it made me both revolted and sad. I went back inside. Got a broom and dust pan. Scooped it up and threw it in the dumpster nearby. It felt both appropriate and sad. The corpse no longer had a soul. It was just a corpse, I told myself. A rat corpse. It needed to be discarded. It certainly shouldn’t lie in the parking lot in front of my spa.
Is this the rat?
“Mystery Man”
Oil/canvas
6” x 4”
2023
Yes, this is a tiny painting. It was achieved by rolling paint onto the canvas and then brushing lines in and wiping areas off with a towel. It is a technique similar to printing but nothing was pressed and there is only one version … this one.
The man’s face emerged from the stain. I had no preconceived idea of what I would paint. I simply highlighted with line and wipes to highlight what I saw. I have no idea what it means or who it is. It’s just a pure joy to create.
“My Friend’s Raven”
Oil/panel
14” x 14”
2023
A long time ago a friend gave me a small painting of a Raven but done in the style of my paintings. I like it at first. But as the years went on I liked it less and less. Then, one day I saw it in my rack of paintings and got it out. I put it on the wall and immediately knew what to do.
The raven was to singular and complete which made it look to emphatically stuck there in its spot. Now the raven disappears into the darkness. And strangely he appears gigantic and even mythical now instead of literal…a bird…of a particular genus and subspecies … almost like a scientific specimen. Now he appears as if in a dream as large and powerful as the darkening landscape or night itself.
“Round Face”
Oil/panel
24” x 24”
2022
I don’t remember what year I painted this. But it was around 2022.
I don’t think it’s that important what year it was painted.
Perhaps what is more important is how I painted it. Maybe someone will be inspired by my approach and make some of their own art.
I started the painting by putting a broad coat of black paint on the whole panel. Then I sprayed it with paint thinner so that the paint ran. While that was wet I sketched a face into the wet paint. Then I took a dry rag and wiped away a little paint in a few places for dramatic effect such as the tip of the nose and ears, lips and chin. The white of the eye was already there and in fact I built the image around this white spot in the eye.
And then most importantly, I did nothing after that.
“Oh!”
Oil/panel
12” x 12”
2022
All I need to do is splash a little paint, spritz it with paint thinner to loosen it up and let gravity do it’s work. Usually within in a few moments a face emerges. I accentuate a little here and there. And there she is. Sometimes I don’t recognize the person I just painted. But in this case it was immediately clear this was one of the young women who worked as a receptionist at my spa and was not so incidentally my sons girlfriend.
It might not be a masterpiece or the most Avant garde. But it is as close as I get to the mystery of connection and the largely unseen fabric that weaves us all together. I’ll take that, thank you very much.
“My Neighbor”
Oil/panel
24” x 24”
2022
This is one of those pieces I painted over and over again without a model and without any goal or “vision” in mind. It’s an interesting way to paint, flailing around half expecting and half hoping it will look like something worth keeping at some point. I remember a quote from Picasso that might be useful here. “Nobody wants to look at searching. What we want is finding.” That isn’t quite as pithy as he put it but that is the message.
Well, I don’t quite agree. Sure, who doesn’t like a strong leader who points out the way with certainty. We all want some of that. But if the leader is too cock sure, a thinking person will begin to suspect he is covering something. Perhaps it’s better to see a little of the search and the struggle. Maybe this searching exposes a bit of vulnerability that deepens trust the way humility does?
Here, I stopped painting when the piece not only looked like someone, in this case, my neighbor, but more importantly, when it seemed to balance surety and doubt. The painting reminds me of my favorite stage of a remodeling project. Things have taken shape enough that I no longer need to hold the whole thing in my imagination. But still unfinished and raw enough to be a bit worrisome and certainly still requiring my imagination to be engaged.
Yes, it’s kind a neat that it looks like my neighbor. But who cares about that. She doesn’t even own that shop anymore, never saw the painting and moved out last year. What matters is that it do something aesthetically. My preference is that the “something” be more than add a touch of blue to a room, or simply make a nice matching ensemble with the couch. Nothing wrong with decorating. But I want more. Something like asking the viewer to feel the tantalizing excitement of something taking shape just before it settles in.
Yes, that will do. Time to stop painting.
Masks will be seen as emblematic of the Covid pandemic for the rest of my life. I was aware of that even when I was painting this. Obfuscation of the figure has been a thing in my work for a long time. So people wearing masks was a golden opportunity to have something very real happening everyday that lent itself perfectly to what I was doing artistically.
A mask is a metaphor for so many things. And in pre-industrialized cultures, wearing a mask often meant literally becoming the spirit it represented for the purposes of ritual invocation often in association with a blessing for fertility or rain or a good harvest or in some way a demonstration of respect for something bigger and more powerful than oneself. It was a way of diminishing one’s particular identity to be enlarged by a higher power.
It was disheartening to me that many of my contemporaries could not diminish themselves or endure this minor discomfort for the benefit of the larger community.
I found it intriguing to see people with masks. What did their whole face look like? And when would I get to see more? Things like that.
As a painter who understands that art itself is both a way of masking and at the same time unmasking, this was just good fun. Ultimately it reminded me that my work as an artist was to make the invisible visible. If that meant deliberately obfuscating something in order to call attention to the very fact that things are masked … well … so much the better.
