I have always been concerned with meaning, allusion and narrative – something outside “pure” painterly concerns. Barnett Newman made great “pure” paintings, but I have always felt that I was made of baser clay. I want to tell a story, even if that story is cryptic or fragmentary. Prior to 2011, the focus of my […]

“I had a break-through in my painting when I began thinking metaphorically. It started with a vein in a forehead, then the realization that everything could be vascular. So tendrils of hair became capillary, as did tendrils of light, stripes in a shirt were arterial, a scrunchie hairband a thrombosis. This was a key for […]

Abstract painting requires a huge amount of faith in oneself. The process is mysterious and almost impossible to teach, as each artist needs to find his/her own way. If one can approach each painting having the love and trust that things will be all right, that an image will come eventually, we will make the […]

My own personal, most dominate, influence as an American painter from the beginning has always been de Kooning and to this day I don’t think I have ever gotten over “Pink Angels” simply for the way in which de Kooning uses line as an articulating, overlapping depth element and for the way he plunges that […]

Each of us will have a unique compilation of remembered sensations and it is how this material shapes our work that will distinguish my paintings from those of the next painter. We really don’t have all that much control over what we produce when we work from within. What unfolds on the canvas evolves slowly. […]

In working, I try to crystallize all of my ideas, observations and impressions about line, architecture, color and geometry. At the same time, I try to keep the result open ended, so that the viewer can bring their own thoughts, and reinterpret their own experiences, to find that sensation of place that we hold in […]

When I made this painting it felt as if it was taking shape in my peripheral vision. It took a gentle act of will to keep it there long enough to finish it, like one of those dreams in which you’re flying but you know not to think about it too much or the dream […]

Eventually a structure that pleases me starts to emerge. Sometimes shallow space, sometimes deeper space reminiscent of a landscape or an interior. I want imagery in my work to be difficult to pin down…I want the viewer to be able to enter into an open-ended dialogue with the work, the same process that brought me […]

…so much of painting is this. It’s a recalling and churning up of experience and memory that can never be planned, relied on, or trusted. But my process requires trust. I begin with random marks and colors that over time coalesce… . Little by little, the anxiety lessens as…decisions are made and options grow fewer […]

A limited palette lends itself to the method of working from inside out: from the center of a color scale towards its poles. A painting starts within a narrow range of color-values and expands outwards, as I grope to overcome the limitation of the resources and broaden the range of tones, temperatures and color sensations. […]