Current Paintings: 2024 -- 2025
SEEKING QUESTIONS TO LIFE'S BIG ANSWERS
When I painted landscape
imagery and the constructed environment years ago, I liked to
talk about formal concerns: painting as map or diary or arena
linking visual and verbal, conceptual and material, fact and
fiction, abstraction and representation; not to mention a blend
of styles and a viewer building bridges between disparate ideas.
While all this remains true, with the paintings today I would
say that, given how many images we are all bombarded with every
day via the media, I am simply interested in making memorable
ones.
The figure has taken center stage since the early 2000's, and there are perhaps four different levels on which one can consider the work: 1) on the beauty level, by which I mean the combination of painting media (watercolor, oil, ink) and styles (abstraction, representation) in a complementary tension that augments the imagery involved; 2) on a political level, in that my goal with the guys who dominate the images and constitute my muse is to populate an art world with them-- an art world where the female image, nude or otherwise, is about as normal as a burger and fries, while the male image continues to be considered, by some, suspect, and is thus in short supply; 3) on the textual level, presenting titles that can be read in varying ways and short stories that are written before or after the images come along, but in any case are springboards for the reader's imagination; and 4) on the transcendent level, an attempt to depict a thoughtful, if not vulnerable, Everyman, reaching beyond the fleeting surface idealization associated with youth and hopefully going far in terms of metaphor, poking around such timeless ideas as: truth, beauty, faith, time, the infinite, what we learn and what we know.
It may seem questionable indeed these days to even concern myself with such unanswerables, but in an era when political and spiritual leaders assert that they in fact have the answers for us all, I think that art has the capacity to imagine otherwise, to offer some transcendent spark to bridge the gap between intent and form, between idea and the evidence of our lives. Muse indeed.
Note: At times my focus is on paper works in series, for instance the MUSE/MUSEUM watercolors and TATTOO DETOUR drawings from Honolulu. Therefore, select images from these series have been incorporated onto this page along with the "usual" canvases. More images from these series can be found on their dedicated pages.
Note 2: As of December, 2022, I am including a few PHOTOGRAPHS in the mix, to contextualize the paintings within my "usual" realm of visual interests.
