ARTIST’S STATEMENT II, 2015

 

My goal always is to represent scenes and subjects that capture my gaze and lay a hand on my soul, causing me to pause and see; then to paint them as faithfully and passionately as possible, with all the energy and skill I can muster.  Occasionally, I create something which in my eyes is beautiful; reflecting and/or refracting by my lens somehow the beauty of creation, and hopefully adding to the sum of beauty in the world.  If one must obey the impulse to create something, this seems like a valid objective.

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My best paintings are metaphors.  Although they document the temporary present (the “contemporary”), by imparting to them the right mood, they allude to the eternal also.  Sometimes a painting of quite lasting value can be created in this way.

 

From time to time, visual moments occur that, though fleeting, stay with me. They repeatedly call to me to interact with them by painting.  This, for better or worse, can involve a broad range of subjects.  I do not consider myself primarily an architectural, landscape or figurative painter, but merely a painter.  While some subjects lend themselves readily to painterly interpretation, others require more strenuous reconstruction or reinvention.

 

The actuality of a particular scene having already been distorted—abstracted—by my own lens, as it were, I try to express with the skills at my disposal the subject in its essential qualities to the viewer as realistically as makes sense to me, understanding that what constitutes realism in painting can be treated and appreciated variously.  But apart from the traditional method of converting an experience “in the round” to an experience “on canvas in paint,” I choose to leave further abstraction to others.

 

So, in some detail, with use of the plastic potentials of the painter’s art (i.e., color, contrast, form, line, etc.), I compose a unified representation as best I can of the view and subject that captivated me in the first place, in an attempt to share the emotional meaning, albeit through an alternative medium; and, in a sense, set it in time. 

 

That these paintings assume a documentary, or even historical, quality is a consequence of this method and my personal style, and of the alchemy of painting itself.