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

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

Never Trust the Fox

left panel
15 x 60

right panel
15 x 60

I can run I can I can. This is another painting that got bound up in my decade+ hiatus. During a brief time where I had a small studio in a single car garage at an apartment where I lived in 1991, I was able to work on three paintings. The right panel of this diptych was freshly begun when I stopped work and moved to new digs, where I was unable to manage a satisfactory work space. The dimensions of the canvas had been specific to cover the ugly backside of some kitchen cabinetry that faced out into the living room of that apartment. My oldest daughter was three when I stopped working on it. It was a well defined rough sketch at the time, and used it for decor on the walls of various bedrooms that my daughters shared throughout the next ten years or so. It was however far from a finished work. When I resumed work in 2002, I was met with serious protests from my girls, who had grown up with the unfinished painting as a part of their lives, and didn't appreciate the changes that it began to undergo. Free from the original constraints of covering the ugly cabinet work in a long forgotten apartment, I began to re think this project and decided to develop it further as a diptych with text elements, similar to the word paintings I had done in previous decades. In addition, I am now in the process of fabricating an ornate gilded picture frame with the title " Never Trust The Fox"carved onto it as a decorative element and a part of the conceptual foundation of the piece. The panels go together as a long, horizontal mirror image with the text on the left and the folk art styled image on the right

Oil on canvas
15 x 120
1991/2002/frame in progress

0 Degrees 155w

Or otherwise known as The Sea Monster Painting.
There is an array of NOAA weather buoy's across both hemispheres in the Pacific Ocean that track weather conditions, water temperatures, and currents, in order to learn about and predict the El Nino events that cause such havoc in the global climate from time to time. The title of this painting is the latitude and longitude of the center buoy in that array. This would be sort of an allegorical painting I suppose but that is an awfully big word for me and I don't suppose I really know what it means! Really though, I wanted to tell a story about mans historical fear of the unknown and longstanding effort to tame the natural world and thus be safe. This painting is partners with the Drowned Man on many levels. I will leave it to the viewer to figure it all out. I will say that the sea monster himself is a hybrid of a fifteenth century nautical map monster and a manga styled dragon which I did to please my young daughter who was passionate about that kind of artwork at the time that I began this work. She has moved on in her aesthetic appreciations, but this large scale painting remains very popular with young children, especially ten year old boys!

2006
oil on canvas
72 x 84

Looking Out of the Bay

And here is the final painting. Too large to either put into my storage space, or to bring with me when I cleared it out and moved my artwork here to Portland, it has had a place on a large wall in my family's home in Huntington Beach California since it's completion in 1987

The Bay
Oil and 22k gold leaf on canvas
120 x 60

In Contemplation of Kline 1987

Franz Kline "Nijinsky"

This six foot square canvas is the result of two divergent parts of my life coming together in a somewhat random fashion. This was a bit like my pondering the visual relationship between sihlouetted trees and UPC codes which then led me to translate Andy Warhols 32 soup cans into 998 trees alongside a river in the Bar Code Project. In this case, my work as a picture framer in Los Angeles in 1987 brought me in close contact with the Museum of Contemporary Art's collection of Franze Kline paintings which had been recently donated and were being prepared for the museums innagural exhibit at the new downtown location. I had a black telescope eye goldfish of significant size and finnage at the time, and whilst studying my fish as I wound down from my job I discovered a close relationship visually between my fish and the paintings I had been working with. See for yourself!

Note: As I'm reviewing this post I have discovered a surprisingly detailed resemblance between the right third of my work and the composition in the Kline painting that I found to illustrate my narrative here. This is pure coincidence but serves to illustrate my point quite nicely. I did my work from sketches taken from life, and only became familiar with Klines "Nijinski" during the google image search for this article!

1987
oil and enamel on canvas
72 x 72
Kline photo courtesy of timeout.com

The Realm 1987

This large work, (60" x 72"), from February of 1987 was the high water mark from my early years striving to find my path as an artist and still stands in my mind as my most masterful work of art. The product of years devoted to learning the craft of painting, and my epiphany regarding the poetic possibilities of picture making and story telling through my artwork, I saw this painting in my mind as a complete vision and knew exactly how I wanted to execute it. Due to it's size and complexity both in composition and glazing layers, it took me close to two weeks to complete, even though I worked quickly with a clear vision and almost no need for revising. This was and is a rare experience for me when I work, as my general approach to making art is to first get something started, and then follow a path of experimentation and revision until my growing understanding of the work allows me to see the correct path to hone and fine tune the image to it's own true nature. This can actually be a very frustrating process for me, and with large work it is usually the case that I have to let it lie fallow for weeks at a time in order to get a sense of what either works, or doesn't work, so that I can go forward and work effectively. In painting "The Realm" I never experienced doubt or frustration, only exhilaration at having every brush stroke, wipe, and drip work out for me exactly the way I had hoped it would. Ironically, I was at the threshold of a long hiatus. By the end of summer my studio and paint supplies would be in storage. It took me until 2002 to get it all back.

The Realm
oil on canvas
60 x 72

The Drowned Man 1986

This painting from 1986 was the beginning of my current approach to making pictures. I had made some technical discoveries in terms of working in oil paints, and applied them to a narrative imagery in a way that was totally new for me. I think of these works as poetic narratives. Though I am reluctant to put that kind of label on my own work and it is really for others to decide if my work can be called "poetic", outside of any public discussion of my work, this label has served me in private to define the quality of these paintings within the context of my own portfolio. For most of the last six years I have primarily relied on landscape paintings to re-establish my skills with the brush, use of colors, and the tactile qualities of the paints and mediums. Occasionally I have dipped into the narrative realm and cross-bred the landscape work with conceptual ideas and my poetic narrative ideals, but my current drive and interest is to launch full bore into the wacky world of story telling with pictures. The Watermelon Girl is part of this. Stay tuned!

1986
oil on canvas
67 3/8 x 37