My Paintings

People often ask me about my paintings. I think like other artists I draw on my life, my surroundings and my emotional responses to dreams and nightmares for content. Many artist opt for abstraction because it allows the viewer to be in a liminal space and draw their own conclusions based on colors, forms, and how the shapes and use of space, texture, application and painterly execution affects that individual’s experience.

I tend toward the surreal, evocation, mythological, figurative and emotional referential in my visual art. My evolutiion has been development is a combination of early formal training starting in Jr. high and rooted in my seven year old self scribbling on the kitchen wall. My first formal classes were with Mrs. George my art teacher who I was crazy about. In 1959-60 I majored in studio art, art history and minored in philosophy and aesthetics. I was most attracted to the German Epressionists at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the vogue with Jackson Pollack and William DeKooning leading the pack. My art teachers were all men with the leading brute of the moment being a “paint with your dick type” that dominated university art departments during the 1950s after the second world war. Many of these macho guys ended up at U of Ms art department which was little more than a bunch of falling down shacks at the margins of the more impressive campus. Gene Massin was a large, jovial, painter and friend of Lenny Bocour, who started Bocour artist color paint factory in Manhattan in 1932 and ran it until he retired. So, a big deal and impressive to a bunch of know next to nothing freshman art students.

Threshold expresses exactly what the title implies. Many people find themselves at a cross road at various points in their lives. Decision making is about life channging events that make you who you become in your life’s journey. Philsophy is something that has guided and directed me in my interior travels. I invite you to enjoy this little work a little larger than a 6 x 8in oil on canvas that embodies my particular turning point after a betrayal of trust. If anyone who follows my blogs has had a similar experience relating to this work won’t be hard.

I have recently been juried into an exhibit of over forty artists at the Gay center in New York City. I will blog about my 8 x 11 in Incarciration in Events.