Floating Like A Blurred Shadow Drawing

I am 65 years old, married with five children. I have been painting since adolescence. My first painting, painted when I was seventeen, I gave to a girl of sixteen, who became my wife. I studied art in college and philosophy in graduate school. There I was most interested in grasping the nature of understanding the essence of ethics. The art movements that most appeal to me are German Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism, though for a time I tried my hand at minimalism. I work in all media, but I have never shown my works before or attempted to sell them. My profession is psychiatry and in that capacity I have treated thousands of people over the past thirty years. I spend my day listening and trying to understand my patients so that I may offer them help. My average patient is between eighteen and forty years old. These are people building their lives based upon how they see themselves in the world and through the decisions they make. I try to help them find their true selves and to achieve their goals. In my art work, I explore the beauty and pain of this time of life. Almost all my recent work has been figurative. I have drawn and painted a series of nudes derived from black and white photographs, using acrylic, ink, charcoal, graphite and oil sticks on paper. I wish to evoke the sensuousness of the body while emphasizing the physical presence of my materials and their interplay across the surface of the field. I love the harmony of bright color and incisive line. The resulting picture is a celebration of the body and a record of the act of recreating it on paper. Each person is an individual and the art of treatment is to solve the riddle of the individual’s calamity. Similarly, in creating a work of art, I try to approach each work as an act of discovery. I tend to work in series as I explore a theme. Each time I approach the theme I may start with a different medium, or use a different color or tap into a different feeling. I often don’t know what I am trying to get at until I have finished and sense the fulfillment of my goal. Since childhood I experience internal, vivid images that enter my mind’s eye either when I experience strong emotion or while drifting to sleep. These images are very bright, as if made of pure light, and I can see, simultaneously, their intricate details and the sense of the whole. My paintings and sculptures are often influenced by these visions.