The Artist’s Statement

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.”

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“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.”