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

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

The Tempest

Well, a bit of a stretch here to call this one poetic, but it is one of my pioneering pieces in the narrative vein so I will label it here to group it together with the other poetic narrative works. It's absurd humor and in your face crudness in the execution have always made this one a handful for many people to appreciate, and also made it one of my favourites! It features twin towers. I had seen the twin towers in Manhattan, and there are also a pair of towers in Century City in Los Angeles where I lived at the time. The towers in this painting aren't specific archcetectural features, I simply found the visual effect of identical twin scyscrapers a compelling visual and used them here to represent the harshness and isolation of the urban landscape. There is alot going on here with the factory puffing smog into the red sky and the artificial mountain in the backyard of the suburban house (think Disneyland) I suppose the Greek diety is going to blow it all away so that we can start anew? I worked on the study more as an independant doodle and saw all this as I contemplated what it might have been, and so found the path for the large painting you see here.


The Tempest
1983 acrylic on canvas
64 x 40



study
1982 acrylic, charcoal and collage on board
16 3/4 x 12 1/2

Picket Fence

Well, I have been putting up a friend in my studio for a week and therefore have not had an opportunity to work on my Watermelon girl so I will continue here with another of my word based series from 1980. Finally the complexity of the real landscape of Santa Barbara county had crept into my work, and though this painting is primarily conceptual in nature, I was beginning to have fun with the representation of real things.

1980
acrylic and painted wood
35 x 45

Santa Barbara 1979

Santa Barbara Landscape #2 Horizon Line

Continuing with word work, I did this early in my 17 month stay in Santa barbara. Huntington Beach had given relatively simple landforms with a basic straight line horizon and only trees and the walls of the subdivisions to break this up. This was especially true in the case of the ocean. The mountains around Santa Barbara come in close to the city and the ocean, and rise up all around crisp and clear. This complexity crept into this painting a bit but I did not yet have enough experience with this perspective for it to fully intrude into my painting. It might have been a more successful painting had I made it four months earlier, in the presence of a truely dominating horizon, looming through a hazy atmosphere.

Acrylic on two stretched canvass'
63 x 28