"Black Capped Chickadee" Painting

I love art. I love making art. I love building. I look at art everyday even if I don't have time to make it. I love painting; I love drawing and mark making, print making, and construction. I love layers. I live for pentimenti.

I love art history. Like Matthew in the Bible traces the genealogy of Jesus back to the beginning of man, I trace my "lineage" of art back to Manet, Monet and Cezanne.
Van Gogh. Matisse. Mondrian and Kandinsky. de Stael.
Motherwell, Newman and Hoffman.
Rothko, Kline and Pollock. Hopper and Avery. Diebenkorn.
Johns. Stella. Dunlap.Reedy. Gusterson, Simons, Burridge and Brown. I have their pictures and quotes on my studio walls. I hope I would make them proud and make art worthy of their influences.

For me and my journey, it is very important to know and understand the who, what, when, why, and how these Modern Art Masters created. My personal, intimate experience of mixing colors, stretching canvases, framing prints, holding brushes, or charcoal, or graphite, or scissors is built upon my passion for the Modern Masters and my teacher/mentors. The foundation they laid for me is at the core of my language/ style/ approach to making art. Like Motherwell stated, I work in series because a good thought usually cannot be communicated in just one picture. Artists need a language. Artists build our own language- one mark, one painting at a time.

Contemporary. Direct and reactive, spontaneous- yet- intentional. Overlapping and over-painting. Heavy-handed and manly describes my artistic personality. My style and application of my mediums (acrylics, oils, inks, graphite, collage, charcoal, watercolor) is more like a framing carpenter than a master furniture maker. I always build in layers of medium. Under-painting, mark-making, paint, sometimes collage, sometimes mono printing. More paint, more marks and so on.