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NOTE: These pages are best viewed on a screen larger than a cell phone in order to really see the paintings. It's important to take your time looking at these paintings, to go slowly and let your eyes and brain digest them over time. I've never been interested in making paintings that reveal themselves easily or that are about one thing. I've always loved paintings that can be discovered and then rediscovered, seeing different things each time you look at them. This website is going to be here for a long time so you can take your time, which will make a huge wonderful difference in the end.
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My intention and my work has always been about reflecting my personal truth, which is pretty standard for most artists. My experience of life has always been surrounded by wonder and appreciation. I've always been curious about not just what I saw around me but about how it all came together and worked. Since childhood I've always appreciated the stuff that we humans have all constructed to make our lives operate easier and more efficiently. I always quietly assumed that we were all here to work together in order to celebrate our creative minds and to wonder our way into the next creation. It just seemed obvious...
My intention and my work has always been about reflecting my personal truth, which is pretty standard for most artists. My experience of life has always been surrounded by wonder and appreciation. I've always been curious about not just what I saw around me but about how it all came together and worked. Since childhood I've always appreciated the stuff that we humans have all constructed to make our lives operate easier and more efficiently. I always quietly assumed that we were all here to work together in order to celebrate our creative minds and to wonder our way into the next creation. It just seemed obvious...
Acrylic and noodles on canvas - 32 in. x 40 in.
Thursday 5/12/1988 - Private Collection
Acrylic with string, rice & noodles on canvas - 36 in. x 42 in.
Friday 6/10/1988 - Private Collection
Acrylic on canvas - 24 in. x 30 in.
Thursday 7/28/1988 - Private Collection
Humans creating together is a form of celebration for me. Of course our mutual creations can lead to things not worth celebrating too, but the fact that we can make something tangible from a simple idea is a marvelous adventure and is relatively endless in its potential and possibility. I am driven to bliss just by this fact, and have been excited by it since I discovered its reality as a child. We can only grow more and learn more and become more than we were before we considered the new idea. And the act of creation from ideas doesn't stop or have a shut-off feature - it just goes on and on without end.
When I paint I see these little worlds of possibility within each new brushstroke creating a new part of the composition. Little worlds in combining the various colors with various choices that together determine where to brush next, where not to brush, and when to stop painting altogether. The paintings actually guide me to essentially paint themselves. They become their own beings in the time that it takes for me to bring them forth. I only have to pay attention as the painting evolves into a living reflection of what I see and what it wants to become...
Acrylic on canvas - 42-1/2 in. x 26-5/8 in.
Saturday 9/3/1988 - Collection of the Artist
We had just started dating seriously and I was completely smitten with Olga. I was living at 1330 Hayes St. in the upper flat which also served as my painting studio. My happiness had never reached this kind of height and this painting reflects as much of that as I could translate via brush and canvas. This is also a painting about building and creating structure together - about recognizing what makes each other tick and tock and how to best create even more love together. It's also about transformation with a nod to the great unknown that lies deep in every interpretation of who that other person is and who we might be to them.
outside the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco,
which I used as one of the references for Painting 015 below.
Acrylic and string on canvas - 48 in. x 42 in.
Wednesday 12/4/1988 - Private Collection
I wasn't sure what I had tapped into with Never Is Enough Enough but I knew I wanted to use photo references of myself at around 11 years old and my oldest brother Christopher at around 4 years old and in black & white. In the old photo of me I was leaning on a car with my left hand, and so by superimposing this image with the image of my brother it appears as if I'm pushing down on his head, which I'm not sure if I meant to do or not. This pushing aspect gives the composition it's tension, but I never look at it that way. I see myself leaning on him, using him as a brotherly foundation so to speak, and as the helping advisor he often was to me while growing up. Christopher loved the San Francisco beaches and loved surfing so the crashing coastline waves are for him, with the remainder of the composition showing buiding blocks with dimensional pieces leading to unknown places. And of course there are steps, a clear sign of growth, change, evolution and struggle. Taking those emotional steps together, sometimes willingly and sometimes not.
Broken Canvas No. 1
Acrylic on embroidered cotton - 32 in. x 22 in.
Friday 1/20/1989 - Private Collection
I was feeling really happy and confident about what I was painting. I was surprised at what was taking place in my work and in my mind. Prior to completing these paintings I didn't know I had the freedom to just paint and have a composition appear before me that would then help me decide what to do next as I painted it. It was an exhilerating exchange happening between myself and the act of painting the pictures.
This confidence led me to start to incorporate imagery from some of my photographs again, as seen in Paintings 014-016 above. This time I didn't have to figure out ahead of time what the compositions were going to look like as I did in Paintings 001-003. All I needed was to refer to the photos and simply build the colors, forms and compositions around and within the photographic imagery. I loved knowing that I could take the so-called reality of a photographic image and easily meld it into the painted abstractions from my imagination.
Painting 016 above is also the first of my Broken Canvas series of paintings with the head opening of the shirt garment I used to stretch and paint on also being open to the wall behind the painting. This hole in the painting broke all the conventions of normal two dimensional picture making on a flat canvas-like surface. Since it was relatively easy to essentially paint around the hole, I didn't think much about it aside from it being a novel aspect of the painting.
Broken Canvas No. 2
Acrylic on stretched cotton over plywood - 17-3/4 in. x 20 in.
Sunday 2/5/1989 - Collection of the Artist
Broken Canvas No. 3
Acrylic on stretched cotton over plywood - 35-1/2 in. x 33 in.
Orig. Finished Thursday 3/9/1989, Reworked and Finished Thursday 1/3/1991
Collection of the Artist
Paintings 017 and 018 both used solid plywood backing to support the stretching of clothing material over the top in order to give me various textures and a small amount of three dimensional space to help accentuate the compositions of these paintings. Although they're not "broken" open to reveal the wall behind, I consider them part of the evolution that led to the more obvious and technically correct Broken Canvases that followed beginning with Painting 022.
Acrylic and noodles on canvas - 42 in. x 36 in.
Wednesday 4/23/1989 - Private Collection
Acrylic on embroidered cotton - 18 in. x 12 in.
Thursday 5/25/1989 - Private Collection
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