October-I Print

The “October” Series was painted in my studio in Saratoga Springs, NY after I moved there from Venice Beach, CA. The paintings reflect the natural environment of Saratoga in the autumn, a time of wild colors and astonishing golden-yellow and flame red leaves that swirl, in clouds, from the trees. Looking back at the work I did in New York and LA, I am struck by the lyricism—the “impressionism”—of these new works, and the sense of joyfulness that they express. For any artist, the process of making art is a process of discovery that is, at once, exhilarating and daunting; for, to create “good art,” an artist must commit their all to the work—their body and their soul. Any notion of a plan or pre-visualization for the work at hand is soon discarded, as the artist engages in the work. I, for one, find that I make that leap only with hesitation and a good deal of procrastination. For days I will invent trivial things to do, while the painting I want to paint ruminates around in my mind. And then, one day, after taking a deep breath, I step into the studio and plunge into the stream. Almost instantly, the rest of the world falls away. And, once lost in that zone, I find it difficult to return to the shore. I will paint until I am drained, and paint is splattered everywhere, on my clothes, my shoes, and the walls. But when I, at last, drag myself out of the studio and collapse with a glass of wine, I feel reborn, flooded with the kind of hormones that runners must enjoy after they collapse, half-dead, at the finish line. People have said that there is no abstraction in art—every work is an effort to accurately represent an experienced reality—and I certainly agree. Though I have long thought of myself as an abstract expressionist, the paintings in my “October” series are, to me, works of realism that represent my best attempt to represent the world in which I live.