About Me and What I Do

As a painter of landscape I am enamored of the poet A.R. Ammons in his ars poetica, “Corsons Inlet,” perceiving:

"an order held in constant change,

that I have perceived nothing completely,

that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk."

I address my preoccupation with the concept of documentation and change.  I use photographic studies as a preliminary means of investigating my subjects.  I remember shooting a dozen photos of the trees near the lake outside my door on a fall day, a storm approaching from the southeast.  In the image I eventually chose to paint, the light, almost parallel to the ground, resulted in side-lit forms, long dramatic shadows, and crisp lines.  The evergreens I saw in the frontal plan, I later rendered in a characteristic silhouette; vibrant trees lit as if on fire light the middle plane and on the right in the painting an important patch of blue made its statement. Of course when I returned to the site the next day, all the leaves had fallen.

For almost 20 years I’ve traveled to Europe. Some of these trips were led by my wife thru the community college where we both taught. Other trips were with our good friends the Chaves. My favorite trips were with the Chaves. We would plot out a route, rent a car and be off. We would stop at a small village, and Nancy and Diana would search out the best restaurant in the village Meanwhile Bob and I would find a place to have a drink, Bob would circle the table searching for the best scene to draw. I always let him select the “best view”. That meant I had to take whatever was left and make something great. We would settle in, order our drinks and out would come the drawing equipment. “Dueling sketchbooks”. Who would come up with the best drawing before our wives came back from their search for the best restaurant in town.

I was always inspired by the drawings of Rembrandt and Tiepolo among others. To me their drawings were like two musical instruments playing off of each other. The visual elements of line and tone play off of each other and support each other. In addition they were translating an image to the page using just a pen, a brush and ink. I was never interested in doing coloring book drawings. Complete the outline and then fill it in, I always like to create a 2-D maze on the page to let the viewer wander in and out of the image.

A mono-print is a single print. An image is usually applied or painted generally using, an oil base medium such as oil paint, printers ink on a matrix that has a flat, smooth surface, such as a clean etching plate, or thick plastic sheet, (which is what I use). Once the image is developed, a sheet of damp paper is placed on the matrix with the painted image and run through a press to apply even pressure. The painted image is transferred from the matrix to the paper and thus a monoprint. Since the majority of the pigment is transferred from the matrix to the paper you are only able to get one good, clear transfer. However, there is often enough pigment left on the matrix to print a much lighter “ghost” image which than can be worked into by hand. In each case there is only one “unique” piece.

During the fall of 1988 (wow, almost 30 years ago) I did a suite of mono-prints at Pondside Press in Rhinebeck, New York. Images were developed from photos and drawings during an earlier European trip. I have included a couple other mono-prints from that suite.