Cats

It occasionally crosses my mind to make pictures of my pets. Here are a couple of my favorite feline room mates. Thumper and His Toys 36" x 40" was executed in acrylic and assemblage in 1983 when Thumper was a small kitten, and includes a number of objects attached to the painting that were retrieved from under the stove where he lost them. He often brought objects into the kitchen because they were much more fun to bat about on the linoleum than on the living room carpet. Thumpers Dream 1986 is 45" x 60" and combines heavy matte impasto acrylic surfaces with one of my earliest experiments with oil paint. It is one of the early transitional paintings from the symbolic icon approach of my early work, to the the naturalism that I now employ in search of a more poetic visual language. Princess Cid 2010 final version 30" x 40" is oil glazes from start to finish

Rustic Table

I made this table as a Christmas present for my daughter. It is constructed from sticks of the pine lumber that I mill for the stretcher bars that I use for my paintings, laminated together to make the top, and legs fashioned from yard debris... tree trimmings rescued from the firewood pile. No marshmallow roasting for these sticks!

Princess Cid

This portrait of my other daughters cat was made as a Christmas present for her.

monotype

this print was in collaboration with artist friend Chris Mullins and based loosely on the birds eye view aerial perspective work

Memory In My Dreams

Perhaps it seems a bit early to be posting images from this but I feel like putting this out there to mark the beginning of this project which will be keeping me occupied for a very long time so I and any who care to may look back and ponder it's humble beginnings. This is the initial sketch from a portion of the four units that will make up the upper left hand corner of an image planned out to cover five two foot square canvases high, and ten long. The image is of an historic landmark in architectural history, the four level interchange in downtown Los Angeles, an engineering triumph in it's day, and the beginning of the modern freeway system in the US

Study for Memory/Birds Eye View - progress so far

Toe Island 2001

This image was inspired by the flooding of the Willamette River in 1996. The stretcher I used was built in 1995 at a time when I had no place to work, and it hung in the outbuilding on my property as a spirit guide and inspiration during the transformation of that space into what is now my painting studio.
Toe Island is a tiny sand bar in the Willamette River on the south west side of Ross Island. During the flooding in 1996, the shrubs were all submerged for a prolonged period of time and surprisingly survived the strong current, but were all bent downstream in the wake of the flood. This was the story I wanted to tell here, but the silhouetted trees in the foreground became the inspiration for the bar code paintings that formed the basis for the Andy Warhol Barcode Project five years later. I recently visited the friend in California who owns this painting, and was able to photograph it successfully for the first time.