When I look at the world around me I see innumerable ways to portray it; I am particularly drawn to beautiful landscape backgrounds with mundane and very human features in the foreground, particularly traffic, signs, cars and buildings. The positioning of chaotic, everyday things with peaceful beauty looming far behind seems to be a metaphor for our messy, ordinary lives.
I love texture and color. Lately I have become obsessed with many layers in my work, with knife painting, scraping, thin veils of color and touches of metallics among my favorite techniques. My vision is usually an attempt to portray joy, hope, Heaven or the human journey through life.
My abstract painting, the most frequent genre I frequent, is informed by my decades spent working on many layered landscapes. I think that creating a sense of light and depth in my abstracts is something that I can’t really help. It happens automatically. This piece, “Study: What We Didn’t Know,” (acrylic on canvas panel, 11”x14”) has many areas of metallic gold.
What Art Means to Me
Art is a wonderful thing to me. I find great inspiration and happiness in painting; I think it is so different from other visual media and has a unique way of making one person connect with the thoughts of another. To me, painting means getting out of my head and into expression.
I hope all of my art friends and customers can enjoy and support my gradual change into abstraction and very loose impressionism these last few years. I’m finding so much inspiration in color and in loosely painted attempts to portray nature, heaven, and themes like joy, sadness and mental illness.
See some of my booklets about painting here, and come back later for my upcoming book about watercolor painting (here it is!) Thank you for visiting my site, and click on the tabs to explore my work.
Many of my recent paintings are abstracted landscapes, sometimes recognizable as particular places, and sometimes reduced to just color, shape and pattern.
I’ve been thinking about how I can paint in a way which expresses joy, loss, or peacefulness, or which expresses hope for the future and heaven. Expressing the inexpressible is a tall order, but I’ve started out just using color and depth to paint what comes to mind in a very loose way. Things usually occur to me along the way, and letting a painting “paint itself” in this way is a delight. I’m not sure that I had an option to continue as a representational landscape artist; but the alternative, for me, was to embrace abstraction and very loose impressionism.
Exploring new colors and new techniques has jump-started my inspiration and joy in painting. Using the color purple and a tool like a sander (as in the detail above) is not something I had done until recently.
Focusing on layering and light is another creative boost for me.
A sense of dynamic movement and brushstrokes which are expressive and chaotic have become something which is a part of my abstract painting.