ARTIST STATEMENT

From earliest childhood, in an environment of forced deprivation, mark making was my first language. It is through mark making my story is told.

If mark making is language, the use of color gives this language its voice. Mark making is tactile, color is tonal and is subject to the impulses of sense memory. The process is alchemical.

The act of painting is inspired by the coming of each new day because it opens the possibility of contact with something beyond the self.

BIOGRAPHY

A child of the sixties born and raised in East Texas, my father was a Native American and a veteran of the asian pacific theater of WWII. I was a misunderstood child, who found solace in nature. My first language was mark making.

A good student but also a conspicuous misfit, as soon as I could leave home, I sought art education from community colleges in Dallas, Texas. I consumed everything I could for five years without matriculating. From there, I took the most direct path to where I wanted to go with my work following my own star. In the historic timeline of the last 60 years, I most identify with the modernist movement of the 20th century.

There are many moving parts I can speak about with regard to the making of paintings, a narrative, which can be traced back to childhood, the evolution and the de-evolution in the use of the figure as subject, and the divergence between drawing and color.

Narrative is not imposed but extracted by an archeological process where internal mysteries get revealed. The painted image must find a way to survive the intensive interrogation of a working surface. Depiction emerges from the pentimento.

As a child, I took great interest in the illustrations from a heavy leather bound bible mother bought from a salesman who knocked on our door. My interest was in the pictures, not in the words. I remember being captivated particularly by Giovanni Batista Tiepolo’s “Abraham and the Three Angels”.

Learning to draw the figure became my primary mission early on and it was my success with it that led the way to the wider world of ideas. For the draughtsman the articulated line seeks to divine the truth about nature. Etched into the surface, the trueness of a line is tested with violation. The breaking of it.. then burying of it.. then restating it. In the end I prefer a line that defies censure. Important is the way a curve is made, when drawing the figure the line must hold tension in the same way a tree branch holds a curve in resistance. The truth of it is in how it is felt to be known. The sensual input of drawing for years by observation has provided a basis to step off into modernism and therefore, permitting me to say, I don’t pretend to have invented the language, but I am free to steal any language that works for me.

Examples are found in the way Giacometti built up and broke down the figure so that it could hold a presence. Another, in the lyrical storytelling of Milton Avery’s simplifying of the figure with flat shapes of color. And, there is the thrilling way the abstract expressionists visceralized the tactile pleasure of pushing paint which, for me, is reminiscent of early works created by muddy hands on the side of our trailer home.

In my view, modernism begins with Cézanne. As Cézanne inspired the work of each Matisse and Picasso, two directions diverge and were taken up by the generation of painters that followed. The idealization of color within flat shapes gave license to both the abstraction of Picasso and the saturation of color as a subject by Matisse, latter to be successfully reunited as a force in the works of the Bay Area painters of the sixties…I unapologetically steal from these artists everyday.

Since leaving my studies in 1992, I have traveled and lived in a number of places and in one way or another managed to make a living as an artist. My career on the eastern seaboard was interrupted in 2017 by one too many hurricanes which brought me to the West coast where I have established a studio in the St Johns neighborhood of Portland.

Married three times, I have two daughters. One passed in infancy, the other graduated from The Culinary Institute of Portland.

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