Rubicon Painting

I’m a Knoxville, Tennessee-based painter (via Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Michigan), working primarily with acrylic and a bit of graphite on paper because I like the balance of control and almost-random chance. There’s also some counterpoint emerging in my work between color (I like bright colors) and black-and-white productions. I’m not sure what that’s about yet. Despite having developed some facility in the world of words, while working in the Clinical Psychology field (that’s the PhD, which differentiates me from the famous Chuck Jones) for fifty years, I’ve long recognized I’ll never be able to write the novel I want to read. But I’ve also discovered how, by approaching my efforts with enough receptive curiosity, I can create images I want to view and gestural patterns of color that, somehow, feel meaningful to me; maybe because I can see the texture and gradations of internal experience (that Clinical-Psychology thing, you know) in the pieces. So, painting is where I’m now devoting my energy, later in life. Doing so makes every morning I awake to walk into the studio a day worth … well… walking into the studio. I’ve been asked about influences and, while I’m less sure about literal influence, I do have some people I greatly appreciate. I’ll mention three because I see them as comprising a continuum, with Mark Rothko on one end, with his iridescent (at least, by my eye, when seen in person in The Chapel) color fields to László Moholy-Nagy, on the other with his imaginative designs. And then I’ll place Kazimir Malevich somewhere in the middle with his fiercely tenacious determination to produce exactly what he wanted to create.