Principle I, acrylic, 40x40

Beginning on the spring equinox, this painting absorbed the new season through the layering and blocking of colors over many weeks. The upper right gold patch carried a strong presence and almost overtook the the painting by fragmenting, enlarging and shedding, resolving finally with a balanced call and response of muted golds on opposite sides of the canvas.

Stickney Brook, water color, 18x24

Painting the illusive quality of water proved to be a meditation in light by being aware of the quality of substances: water, current, moss, rock, sky on water. The reading of all the elements changed over the afternoon of sun and shade with the final painting reading as perhaps all of those things.

Spirit, 30"x40"

Spirit will be on view at Mocha Maya's, 43 Bridge Street, Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, along with a dozen other of my paintings from
January 8- February 22, 2009.

Their web site, www.mochamaya.com , has a complete list of shows, poetry readings and fantastic music events.

The Middle Distance evolved soon after Postdeluvial (see image below). A new direction of layering and rotating the painting kept the image "unreadable" resisting identifiable imagery.

POSTDILUVIAN

There is a purple that I forgot I had laid in as an undercoat, before the painting came to this cool, still place. Most of what had been there, is no longer there, and although I was tempted to keep on with that process, one afternoon, I looked and it was "done" This one is called Break.

September 2007 Show
A Candle In the Night
181 Main Street
Brattleboro, Vermont
opening: 9/7 5:30-8

"Aurora" , 42 x 78, first hung on the wall like a physical door for awhile until I turned it horozontally, which is it's present position and one that reads more specifically about inner doors. The process of painting a larger canvas involves the whole body: one can't sit down with it but rather one has to move, engage, shuffle, step widely and dance with it. Perhaps "Aurora" is too easy a title based on color but the layers and layers and scraping and painting again have something to do with our daily comings and goings, our questions and mostly our unknowing. "Aurora", dawn, beginning again, maybe is the right title, a second chance, every day.

Two series have been threading their way onto canvas: the Janus paintings with the ubiquitous "door", the exit and entrance, and a second series called "Static In the Void". This painting, "Transmission", stradles the two and is another bridge painting, not leaving the previous series and not entirely embracing the next phase. What was curioius about the execution was that it was suddenly 'finished' and complete in a way that I put it up on the studio wall and have not taken it down since.

While painting "Threshold" a series of puzzles appeared. The shape and not shape, what was there and then not there but still burned through the color, led to the horizontal divisions. It was perhaps one of the more unconscious pieces in the last year; even the calligraphic markings, put in as scribbles but which came to have their own necessary place burned back through the layers. I love this painting best in the morning light when it literally glows but also love to watch it change with the day.

Rift 30"x30", acrylic

This painting from the end of spring, comes from watching the edge between light and dark, dawn and day and later, when I get back to the canvas, twilight and dusk; the colors grew from the weeks of chill and rain yet every plant was turning into its wakeful state despite the steady floods and scant sun. "Rift" seems to describe this sliding of seasons and the final break from the long winter.





New Morning
30"x30", acrylic and copper leaf on canvas

Summer brings a change of palette, a foreign one: green is seldom a color that I am drawn to- perhaps, here in this lush season with rains and sudden sun there is so much of the verdant shade that I inadvertantly rediscovered it.