Figurhead N0. 5 Painting

Born: Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A., 1942 Home and studio in Williamstown, Massachusetts I have always been concerned with content. At bottom, I suppose, I celebrate the ability to reflect on life and those elements that please, provoke, or quite honestly disturb me, and to fashion poignant, memorable images from those reflections. There are no heroes or villains in my paintings, only ordinary people attempting to get through trying circumstances, large or small, provoking the actions or inactions that shape their identities. I strive to combine the impact of a human presence with a painterly surface rich in anomaly, one that conveys a sense of transience and mutability, even vulnerability. To that end, you will find somewhat meticulously painted passages set within highly textural areas fashioned with sponges and other painterly manipulations. The larger paintings of the past two decades are unstretched canvas cut-outs, virtually life-size in scale. The shaped forms are usually mounted as ensembles on a white wall, the whiteness serving as a timeless, generalized place where the narrative of the piece unfolds. In some sense these works operate similarly to sculpture, in that the human figure is allowed to communicate a condition of life by the power of gesture and expression and the formal qualities of the surface, exclusive of elaboration of an environment.