The Artist’s Statement
“For about a year I vacillated between abstraction and a kind of mid-period Cezanne outdoor scenery. At the end of that first year I was introduced to vinyl, a plastic fixative which can be mixed with the local powdered house paint colors. Overnight, the new medium freed my whole approach to painting and I plunged into a frenzy of bird’s nest-like abstractions. Then objects began to appear, struggling to emerge from the ‘scribbles.’ It was an exciting point, the moment of abstraction into realism. I found that forcing the subject produced a diluted, impoverished message, which I ended by scrapping. The unconscious, on the other hand, produced subject, form and composition that emerged as one. Painting for me is a process of order out of chaos, looking through my ‘inner eye.” I became aware only in retrospect, of the changes taking place in the refinement of my style, color sense, and composition.”
“If I can be labeled, I would wish to be called a New Humanist. I paint the human condition.”
“I got up at five A.M. all summer long and worked until 12:30, swam, ate, siesta-ed, and usually put in an hour or so painting in the cooler part of the late afternoon. Really, I wish you could see what I am doing. I value your good criticism more than I can say. What I’m doing is probably pure psychotherapy, and nothing to do with art. I begin abstractly and just let anything visual appear that will. The results are often humorous, satirical, symbolic. Portraits emerge in unlikely surroundings. . . When I discover what is evolving I sometimes double up with laughter, or feel like a naughty child. Even when I have a bad day or two, my interest is held and time ceases to exist.”