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.

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 Landscape 1979

In league with my word based work from this time, I strove to use assemblage to connect my subject matter here to the real world in as many ways as I could think of at the time. I collected sand and flotsam from the Santa Barbara shoreline, leaves twigs and dirt from inland areas and used cotton fluff and cellophane for things like water and clouds since I couldn't get the real thing. This picture was badly stored for many years and much of the original collage work was lost, including the cellophane and cotton stuffing. I restored this work in 2004 from an old photograph, with materials collected here in Portland

50 x 60
Mixed media on canvas
1979

More Word Painting from the Archives

GAME PLAN (Ping Pong Green) 1978
Using paint color from a can called "Ping Pong Green" which was really the inspiration for this piece, I constructed stretchers that created a window into the canvas where I ran a small section of ping pong table netting for this painting abvout games and rules and strategy in competition.

40 x 48
rubberized playing table paint, acrylic and spray paint on canvas
1979

Gimmik Painting 1979

Title says it all!
This image doesn't adequatly show the rotation of the dayglow paint color flags attached to an electric clock motor that rotate every 15 seconds or so.
Other gimickery includes painting on the reverse side of multiple layers of plexiglass with irredescent paints, and of course the phonetic spelling of the word gimmick itself (though perhaps I should have used only one M in that case) At the time of this piece I had a philosophical opposition to any kind of illusion in my work as well and included a nod towards perspective as another gimmick in this piece. As a final gesture to throw this piece over the top, I signed it in the lower right corner "Art" Sadly the electric motor no longer works. I do not know if that can be restored

Road Test 1979

Second of several paintngs that explored language, the first being the previously posted "Surface Painting" These involved single point conceptual ideas with every possible link that I could think of wrapped into the excution. Road Test was a study of the asphalt and how it's used and what I actually found there. The canvas is stretched on bars in the shape of a road in perspective with related text and items actually found in the street fixed to the canvas, including dirt.

Beggar Dog Bisquits!!

Well, in the beginning at least, my crafting of landscapes from the compositional outlines presented from UPC codes seemed to evoke a sense of humor and absurdity in my work and in this piece I strove to pursue that to a kind of extreme. My favourite restaurent in Los Angeles was a mexican food establishment famous for its hip late night clientele, brown sauce that I was warned to avoid, and dangerous margueritas. They also had a wonderful collection of paintings of Mexican villages rendered on black velvet and little electric lights lighting up all the tiny cottages represented therein. With this painting I tried to capture some of that over the top yet sincere kitsch that I found in those paintings. Abandoning my usual bag of tricks in the pursuit of the perfect brush stroke, I went shopping at the local Michaels craft store, and the nearby fabric store for a full pallete of iredescent fabrics, puff balls, sequins, plastic pearls and puffy paint, and working on a beautifully stretched piece of black velvet with gold metal leaf, this image was born. My friend Vanessa did not approve! Perhaps one day she will reconsider.