“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.
Click a thumbnail to make it appear as the main image. Use the left and right arrows on the film strip to click through the gallery, or click the arrows on the left and right of the main image.