Still Night

A scratch drawing and oil on inked gesso. Night time in the zone above timberline in the Sierra is a special experience. The chill night air drives one into a sleeping bag early in the evening, but the visual delicacy of a landscape illuminated by stars lingers in the memory, drawing one back to the high mountains year after year.

Dusk 2011

Oil on canvas 16 x 20

California Dreaming 2011

oil on canvas 12 x 16

NIght Driving

oil on canvas 16 x 20 2011

New work

Here is the same image from my wood block print re-imagined in oil

Night Light

Continuing with the imagery of a light in the dark, this 30 x 30 canvas is the execution of an idea I've been mulling over for a while now!

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.

Wood block re visited

A couple proofs of an image of California savanna woodblock print, with color hand rolled onto a monotype plate and over printed to create second image

From the model

Some more drawing selections

A Birds Eye View

20 x 20
oil on canvas

figurative work 2009

I have been attending an open life drawing class for five weeks now. It has been 28 years since I have done work from a live model, and during that time period I have rarely visited figurative elements in my work, so I have to admit that in the beginning, while rendering competent work during these sessions, i was not quite happy with my approach, and therefore not quite happy with my results. I have finally settled in and loosened up enough to grasp at the kind of drawings that I really want to play around with. Here is the first of what I hope will become a new body of work.

The Watermelon Girl 2009

Well, What can be said? I began work on this in June 2008, but it didn't really take 10 months to paint... I really spent six months meditating in a cave without food or water. Well, I finally emerged to finish this grand essay, and I will tell anybody who wants to know that I am very happy with the results! Hope you feel the wait was a worth while one!

2009
oil on canvas
60 x 50

It is said that the Moon is made of Green Cheese, 1983

This painting is my donation to the Cascade Aids Projects annual Gala art auction. I have used this grand event with mixed results in recent years to find some exposure for works from my portfolio archives that I think contains certain redeeming qualities, but which have never been publicly exhibited, and also are not likely to find exhibition opportunities elsewhere in my lifetime. This painting began life as a strictly non-objective construct. I came to recognise certain representational elements later...the red bands as the cording on military band unifofrms and the white disk as a moon shape in a night sky. Lately it has come to read rather ominously to me, as a view out from a concrete bunker at night. The title given here is new, created for the entry form for the auction. I felt a need to lighten things up a bit!

The Sky, The Land, and The Talking Sticks

Well, I'm still on a bit of a sabbatical so here is another archive work of interest, from around 1982