Last Stop Before Heaven Painting

I was born in NJ and lived there until graduating from high school. After that I was fortunate enough to be awarded a full art scholarship to the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. I attended from September 1967 - January 1968 after which I followed my family to Los Angeles and ultimately San Diego. For me, painting is always about color, visual communication and exploring the magical aspects of the digital world overlaid with my ongoing respect and appreciation for the great artists and colorists Matisse, Cezanne, Derain, Dufy, Monet, Manet, Munch, Klimt, Van Gogh and Japanese artist Hokusai. Having worked as a graphic designer before becoming a full time artist, I intuitively include intricacies of type and fonts, color, shape and compositional relationships, textural surfaces, pattern, exploration, more exploration, surprise. I paint using acrylic on canvas and watercolor on Arches paper. The conventional and the digital reinforce and inspire each other as I include or work back and forth using the the joy of painting and the digital strengths of Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter and, most recently, dipping my toes” into artificial intelligence (AI) with Chat GPT. These days I naturally combine conventional with digital to create the final artwork. I’m always exploring usual and unusual mark making objects - or just picking up what’s close by if I intuitively feel it will inspire and reinforce what I want to say. Primarily, I feel the contrasting desires to speak sweetly, yet powerfully, quietly, yet expressively, boldly, yet intuitively in the realm of visual communication. By using color, shape, spontaneous brushwork, mark makers, imagination and the wonder of surprise and the unexpected, I immerse myself in the process, the evolving moments of creativity and the unabashed resulting joy of what eventually appears.