Light in the Piazza, Florence Painting

My paintings celebrate the visually absorbing shapes, colors, textures and eccentric details of the urban landscape. For me, buildings are the significant carriers of cultural memory. Surviving the builders and residents, they are reminders of remoter lives and times. Over the years, a city takes on an almost geological aspect, with successive generations leaving behind a layering of architectural styles. The enduring physical makeup of a city directly influences its culture as well as its ability to survive as a place people care about. My landscapes are always without people. The buildings are the complete statement. Within their lines and the mood they evoke, the people who built them and lived in them are revealed more clearly than if they had posed for a portrait. Here lies the emotional resonance which inspires me to paint old houses. There is a hard, beautiful dignity in weathering all those years - pure to themselves and uncompromising. Many people have observed that the buildings in my paintings seem strangely animated, as if they had personalities of their own. The windows, shutters and doors read almost like facial features, elements of individuality that make their presence felt. The scenes I paint are realistic in perspective, but imaginative in detail, color and lighting. My architectural subjects are often idealized to the status of an timeless icon. For many years, I worked solely in pen and black ink. Slowly, I introduced color and have since developed a completely original technique which is characterized by precise ink images with acrylic tones painted over each other, resembling thin semi-opaque or transparent layers. When dry, it produces a smooth matte finish. I work exclusively on wood panels, preferring a hard surface over canvas. Other artists and collectors have compared my medium to egg tempera which employs the application of numerous small brush strokes and produces a brilliant, luminous finish. Prominent egg tempera artists include nearly every painter of the Italian Renaissance and Twentieth-Century revival artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Andrew Wyeth. I'm a full-time artist who has spent the last 35 years creating over 3000 original commissions for individual clients. The majority of my drawings and paintings are of historic homes and landmark buildings in Metro New York, the Hudson Valley, Greater Boston and coastal New England.