Looking back, my work as an abstract painter has often revolved around my love of music. For over a half century I have collected recordings from around the world and also worked as a performing musician and songwriter in the 1960’s.
The French composer Claude Debussy famously said, “Music is not just the notes, but the quiet and the space between them”. He considered himself a colorist, an observer of nature, light, space and movement. To me the essentials of making a painting is a visual analogy of the work of a musician or composer. Both are lively arrangements of sounds, shapes, rhythm, pattern and melodies. I hope to express a calm reflection of the visual music I envision and to convey “sincere moment in time and space.”
The works are made using high-density pigments over primed cross-braced hardwood panels. The color is applied in successive thin layers. I work using handmade tools, blades, brushes, streams of water, Teflon blenders and carbon pencils.
My paintings begin with a complex background field of transparent color formed by overlapping layers. The works quietly transform after layers of patterns, loops, dashes and lines are floated in the space which begins to separate and suggest foreground and background – much like the space between the notes in music.
A meditative rhythm develops within the work – a pace and tempo. Much of the process involves a constant attention to gently washing areas of the surface to make faint ghost images appear.
It is both comforting and affirming that the process of painting always seems to evolve as a journey leading to insights about life and our connectedness as human beings.
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