Generations Ago Painting

Turner is inspiring. "Indistinctness is my forte." Turner's work glows with light and everything is infused with motion. He is arguably our greatest landscape painter' None of his landscapes are static. My work emulates his. Landscapes are fluid; skies threaten, clouds move, grain sways, trees rustle. A city scape is frenetic with abstract traffic. Mist rises and a path beckons one into the scene. The canvas is attacked with knife and brush and enthusiasm. I like my paintings to exude moods and motion and the evolution of my art tends more and more to the knife and the abstract; expressionism vs. impressionism. I now live in San Diego next to the sea. My roots are in the prairies of Alberta and the mountains of the Canadian Rockies. I paint what I know from my past and my present and my travel destinations - whether it is a vista before me or a memory entrenched in my mind. My recent series of portraits entitled "Recollection" represents those of us nearing the end of our lives and pondering what has come before. One reviewer wrote: "Beautiful depth, perspective and feeling emits from these works of art. The artist actually takes you into the painting so that you can feel the work. I will look forward to keeping an eye on future works!" - Laurie Ruffner, Executive Director at Bitterroot Performing Arts Council Another said: Your works are metaphysical. There is a mystery of life in them, of becoming and existence, and affirming the existence of God, all accoutered in a special atmosphere... -Roland Kay. Lately I have been intensely studying the work of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud and the one "following closely on his heels" - the Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan. As one grows older one realizes the past is close behind (as he says in Tangled up in Blue). And my art has become art of the moment, just as Dylan's lyricism and Rimbaud's symbolist poems are of the moment. I am able to conjure up a vision from my memory that appears to me instantly - it is just as close as the moment behind. "We bleed the present moment into a future that never comes and then we recast the future as a past that cannot be recaptured." - Timothy Hampton. My paintings exist suspended in time. When I paint I am aware of that suspension; the scene becomes universal in its impact; timeless. The landscape exists forever on my canvas - immutable. It looked that way just a moment ago - even though the moment captured in my memory is 60 years in the past.