Hoot Owlin' Painting

My Paintings: With these rather large paintings I have created work that allows me to submit to the wonder of where the act of painting may take me. In process, the paintings proceed by shifting between accidental incident and deliberate delineation allowing pretty much everything done on the painting to be challenged, erased, revised, re-iterated; lines dance, pierce, trace, interrupt, inviting play and exploration, a version of hide and seek, while revealing the process of the paintings making and forming a symbiotic relationship between drawing and painting. The colors, marks, shapes, often somewhat hidden rectangles like cartoon cels, that ensue mark time, map or excavate space; they record and reflect the body's presence/absence as tracings of what has been made, unmade and re-made. The narrative possibility of mark making becomes compelling and yet, with this work, it's meaning is withheld or remains uncertain or unclear. I bring the work to a state of "pre-figuration" perhaps a place that allows for hidden secrets, forgotten memories and in-expressible sensations. Likewise, these paintings explore the zany spirit and palette of newspaper "funnies" as well as the challenges of abstract painting. Exaggerated contours reminiscent of spinning feet that signify movement, arched eyebrows, grins and grimaces, railroad tracks going nowhere or everywhere as well as mismatches of shape and color, usually nudge and bump one another in a Rube Goldberg manner. A new direction I am pursuing in paintings such as Fizzles (for Beckett ,Forgotten Stories ,Runaway Blues or The Stroll for example involves creating open and at times provocative, awkwardly uncomfortable and seemingly unresolved spaces within the painting. These areas, often white, either the white of the gessoed ground or a white void further emphasized by repeatedly layering white pigment seem to amplify the questions presented by the paintings and the need to stay and play in the paintings. These paintings are unabashedly pleasure giving in sensibility. They express the joy of painting, the sensuousness of paint, color and line; its capacity to engage all our senses; its tendency to allow for nuance, contemplation and play.