“It All Started with a Paint Party”
Oil/paper
11” x 8.5”
2025
These 52 works on paper are collaborations with an anonymous group of people who signed up to take a class at my studio. The class was designed to give 15 people a chance to try a new way of making art and, let’s face it, have a little fun and make some friends. And, perhaps even make some art or at the very least, something to pin to the refrigerator door.
The class was a success by many measures. All 15 seats were filled. Everybody showed up and everybody had fun. They made a ton of “art” and drank all the wine. And I think most of them made some new friends and possibly a new hobby. As a bonus, they left well over 200 hundred rejects in the trash bin at the end of the night.
Well, they were hardly out the door when I rifled through the trash and spread them all out on a large table to dry. Over the following days I modified them one by one and widdled them down to these 52 images.
I have been doing paintings with rollers for 20 years and even take a little pride in having developed a radically new way of painting. And over those years I have refined and at times radically altered my approach in a display of creativity and productivity to rival some of my greatest heroes from art history. The fact that no one notices this has gone a long way to keep me humble and centered in the work itself which is ultimately where I really want to be anyway.
But there is nothing like gathering a spirited group of creative folks together in a lighthearted setting with a little wine to loosen things up to get a jolt of fresh approaches to a now decades long approach to image making.
If you are familiar with my work in this genre you will easily notice this batch is different in both its variety of approaches and some downright new ways of applying the paint.
Part of the fun and the challenge of working with these was listening to that quiet voice that speaks softly in creative terms. “This one is interesting…..just needs a little black.” “This one just needs to be turned upside down and smeared with pale white.” “These 3 should go back in the trash.” And so on. Some of these works took several approaches over the course of a few weeks. Some just needed a single dash of this or that. And in the end I was excited about some new directions to explore.
The collaborative aspect of these works is part of the intellectual fun of it all too. The whole process begs a few key questions that are very relevant to these times of new AI tools at people’s disposal for all kinds of creative work. What part is it that the human artist contributes? And why does it matter? Why not just display the pieces directly fetched from the trash bin after all. Aren’t they “art” just by virtue of being “selected” by the artist and displayed as such?
Good questions. And some of my forebears would definitely say that yes, simply deciding they were art because they chose them and displayed them as art. Well, that may have been an important position at a certain time, but I think it falls short now and perhaps was even damaging to various aspects of a broader community and certainly the arts community.
It would be easy to say it’s just lazy. And there is probably some truth to that. But that response is itself lazy. Digging a little deeper it also appears Solipsistic to me and may have helped set the stage for the era of narcissism we inhabit now. It presumes the self is all that exists and that the self therefore gets to decide for itself what is art and what is not. In this world integrity is in decline and the very idea of principles beyond the self is mocked. This extends to “artistic” principles as well.
For good reason the idea of arbiters of taste which calcified under the academic system of art evaluation in Western societies in the 19th century had to get overthrown. It had clearly calcified and degenerated into maintaining control to resources and prestige in a world that was undergoing change at an alarming rate, similar to what we are experiencing today.
But it went too far if you ask me. Now there is a kind of inverse encrusted dogma of “anything goes just cause I said so.” This is as stultifying to creativity as an entrenched hegemonic academy of taste. It is equivalent to the overblown rugged individualist who has no regard to just how much he actually relies on so many things beyond himself. And ends with a culture that spends its days taking selfies and yet ironically pursuing “likes” and popularity and celebrity in general at all costs. It is not the vulnerable narcissism of the Greek figure Narcissus who genuinely loved his own image. No, it the malignant grandiose narcissism that thinks they are all that but is more interested in using that to gain the attention of others.
So, no, I’m not going to just pluck these paintings from the trash bin and call them my own even though they were clearly discarded by their makers. At minimum I would have listed their maker as “anonymous” instead of giving them my name and as a result, in some small way, help usher back in a culture of integrity.
Instead, I puzzled over them for days. Making a small mark here and a radical mark there. And slowly over the course of a few weeks made them my paintings. That doesn’t make them better or worse. It just makes them more genuinely mine. Another way to put this would be to say they are now authentically mine. And it is precisely that authenticity that I think is their most valuable quality for this moment in time. As an artist who does believe in universal principles of design beyond my own admittedly solipsistic tendencies to please myself, will ultimately give them lasting qualities worth the paper and paint and archival efforts they take up.
Moreover, knowing they got their first introduction into this world through a group of people gathered to have fun, try something new and have a moment of community also makes me smile.
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“Jomptien”
Oil/paper
11” x 8.5” x 143
2025
Another batch of explorations in the space between seeing and imagining. I continue to think of these works as a crossroads of how we think about the space around us and how it looks to us.
I encourage you to look at them quickly until one of them really grabs you. Then, slow down. Enlarge it and spend a few moments with it before moving on.
Enjoy.
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“Portrait Gallery”
Oil/paper
11” x 8.5”
2025
This gallery should probably be called “Portraits and Figures.” But that just doesn’t sound as good. Most of the paintings feature the face but some also feature the whole figure and in many cases don’t even have a face. The more important aspect is that they all feature a person integrated into and with a surrounding space. In some cases it is a landscape space that the figure is situated in somewhat conventionally, the way we might see a person outside. But the more interesting ones set the figure in such a way that they are not so much in a landscape as of it. The marks that define them are sometimes indecipherable from the marks that define the elements of the landscape. Sometimes they are like visual puns and at others there is an oscillating obfuscation and definition.
In this gallery you will see me integrating the figure or portrait in a way that is closer to how I remember the figure or how I think about it than how I see it. None of these paintings were done in the field or “plain aire” as they say in French. Nor were any of them done with a live model sitting in front of me or even with the aide of photographs.
They are, instead, quiet reflections on the memory or feeling of having just been with the model in a social way or having just been outside and aware of my surroundings.
It’s my hope that looking at these will help enhance your own experience of the myriad ways a person and a place are interrelated and how that interrelationship can be an endless source of visual pleasure.
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“Large Ones”
Oil/paper
24″ x 18”
2025
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“Organic Infusions”
Oil/paper
11” x 8.5”
2025
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“Experiments”
Oil/paper
11” x 8.5”
2025
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“Mountains”
Oil/paper
11” x 8.5”
2025
This gallery includes over 80 paintings that feature mountains in one way or another. This is not only a useful way to categorize my paintings into smaller more manageable chunks for practical purposes such as locating a particular piece, but also to define a key element in the works that are important to me. Mountains as a subject in my works stems from both my life here in the Northwest part of America where there are two majestic mountain ranges in close proximity, but also my lifelong interest in Chinese painting and Chinese landscape painting in particular where mountains are the primary vehicle for communication.
Here, I use them to define and suggest space as well as establish multiple viewpoints, but not in a cubist way. Here it is overlapping frameworks that often repeat or sit in juxtaposition or overlap and even obfuscate each other all in an attempt to reflect how I actually think about mountains and how my memory itself is formed through observation and then subsequent quiet reflection. These are conceptualized impressions of what I saw and how I thought about what I saw.
Enjoy.
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