"A Very Serious Garden - Early Spring Plantings" Painting

Facets, fragments, random ideas Float, stop and land without plan Or reason Only to create form And pattern Recognizable repetitions To be dealt with discovered uncovered understood. If we are open The story of happenstance can tell all. When I step up to the canvas I make a mark... and then another...and another. I let the marks create their own journey on the surface...weaving, constructing, and interacting until patterns and relationships begin to speak to each other and to me. I play and talk to the canvas with my brush. It speaks back. If I listen carefully, I learn what my paintings are about. I am always amazed at their truth. As a working professional artist for over forty years, I have moved through and experimented with many different phases. Looking back, I can always see the logical evolution and flow into every new area. My paintings take me to each new place....I just follow. I like to work in a series....trying to develop and push an idea to see how far I can dig and how much I can learn from it.....to ask it more questions. I discipline myself to stay with an idea until, one day, it is all painted out. Although my subject matter and conceptual ideas may appear to change as I move through these different periods, my most basic painting issues always stay the same. My work is first and foremost about the plastic quality of paint itself ...then about color, line, forms and shapes, and relationships. I look for the unexpected and the surprise. My work is always about the "mark." facebook youtube