These are large gouache paintings on paper that I created between August 2019 and November 2020. This was the first time that I worked in gouache at this scale. It was a refreshing opportunity to work on a large scale without the fuss of say, building, stretching, sizing and priming canvas for example. These drawings allowed me to have more spontaneity and the ability to create many more large immersive images in a shorter period of time. Taken together they become both a yearlong diary and an exploration of motifs that might be seen more effectively on a larger scale.

I began this work as a body of work that might consider the social changes that has been evolving since our current president had taken office and specifically about how it would be exhibited after the 2020 election and whether I would need to anticipate a new administration or a continuation of the current administration. But as the scale of the pandemic began to compete and merge with the Trump phenomenon, I gradually came to see things less as something that was tethered to social change and more as something that was a phenomenal tension between the human and animal worlds; a greater existential struggle for us as a species within a mute parallel world that we thought we had left behind thanks to the promise of technology.

“Jesus Christ!” is an exclamation of anger, surprise or astonishment, while also a reference to an historical figure that was apparently sent to our planet in order to save humanity? The work in this collection (On exhibit 9-15 to 10-31, 2022) thus takes its cues from an observatory perspective of the newly minted, convoluted belief systems rolling out before our eyes on a daily basis in a yet unsaved or dystopian world.

Zoot Coffee
5 Elm Street
Camden, Maine 04849

September 15 - October 31, 2022
Open Every Day
7 am to 3 pm

My series on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is part of a general series of works of mine that employs the motif of a schematic rendering of geological layers. I’ve always been fascinated by geology in general and how the earth has been formed. As an artist I am also interested in schematic rendering or a diagrammatic language as a way of “picturing” things that we might not be able to literally see. For me there is a bonus with certain kinds of schematic renderings and in particular with diagramming geologic strata, how you can be free to really render each geologic layer whatever color, hue, pattern or shade strikes your fancy. It’s possible that actual geologists have a systematic approach to their color scheme choices, but I’m assuming that they really do not and my approach enables me to use this motif as an excuse to paint pretty stripes!

A body of work created specifically for an exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Portland Public Library. Each artist was invited to find an object or work of art from the library's collection or archive to create new work from. I found a scathing, bitter letter from the south, expressing contempt and just deserts towards this northern city, against the destruction and loss of life endured within the writer’s home state of Alabama during the war, a letter of response to the devastating great fire that destroyed much of Portland, Maine on July 4, 1866. This letter was in stark contrast to the hundreds of letters written in support, many containing monetary donations, of relief for the "Portland Sufferers". All of the original letters have been cataloged and housed in the library's archive.

This guided me to explore contemporary hate speech and the problems of patriotism and ex-patriotism all reconfigured as old, worn, singed artifacts.

Experimenting with creating inkblots on rice paper I discovered, after inadvertently blotting two sheets at once, a way of creating modules I could arrange, side-by-side, into symmetrical compositions. I soon began to fold larger sheets, blot them and then arrange them unfolded as larger groupings. Within these patterned fields I painted the image of a “jacked” Jesus Christ. The combination of this motif and the mirrored staining shortly brought to my mind an association with the Shroud of Turin, the well-known Christian relic, which, having been stored as a folded fabric for hundreds of years, had a similar stain patterning. The Shroud Cycle then is an aesthetic search or process within an associative context.

For the Shroud Cycle I would create themed groupings of "ink blot" based pieces. Each group would fit an exhibition venue. “Who is My Avatar?” at the Cyr Gallery of the Bangor Public Library, would explore vertical compositions of primary figures. “Let There Be War” at Zoot Coffee would include wide panoramic arrangements of horizontally reflected patterns that suggest the theater of battle. “Why Are We Here?” at Cynthia Winings Gallery's cathedral-like second floor barn space would consist of a hanging Jacob’s Ladder contraption whose design would be loosely proportionate to the Shroud of Turin, which consists of one long fabric panel that originally shrouded a body from toe to head, continuous over the top of the head and back down behind the body, ending at the body’s heels. “O Earth” at the Sohns Gallery would consider the suggestion of the earth as a final resting place or a current repository for an endless array of human made structures or waste products.

Experimenting with creating inkblots on rice paper I discovered, after inadvertently blotting two sheets at once, a way of creating modules I could arrange, side-by-side, into symmetrical compositions. I soon began to fold larger sheets, blot them and then arrange them unfolded as larger groupings. Within these patterned fields I painted the image of a “jacked” Jesus Christ. The combination of this motif and the mirrored staining shortly brought to my mind an association with the Shroud of Turin, the well-known Christian relic, which, having been stored as a folded fabric for hundreds of years, had a similar stain patterning. The Shroud Cycle then is an aesthetic search or process within an associative context.
For the Shroud Cycle I would create themed groupings of "ink blot" based pieces. Each group would fit an exhibition venue. “Who is My Avatar?” at the Cyr Gallery of the Bangor Public Library, would explore vertical compositions of primary figures. “Let There Be War” at Zoot Coffee would include wide panoramic arrangements of horizontally reflected patterns that suggest the theater of battle. “Why Are We Here?” at Cynthia Winings Gallery's cathedral-like second floor barn space would consist of a hanging Jacob’s Ladder contraption whose design would be loosely proportionate to the Shroud of Turin, which consists of one long fabric panel that originally shrouded a body from toe to head, continuous over the top of the head and back down behind the body, ending at the body’s heels. “O Earth” at the Sohns Gallery would consider the suggestion of the earth as a final resting place or a current repository for an endless array of human made structures or waste products.

The idea to create the works in this collection here emerged out of a fascination with the action of pouring ink onto rice paper and seeing how it would slowly spread and create irregular shapes and margins. I had first started using black sumi ink in the early 90s, but back then I preferred watercolor paper to rice paper, which generally resisted long calligraphic gestures. Thus some of the rice paper that I had purchased at that time became lost among my studio materials for decades until recently, when I rediscovered it and had a more open enough mind to try and figure out why this particular support was even invented.

Works included in a print publication I created to present a visual diary of my experience of the Trump presidency. To purchase or view the publication : https://www.blurb.com/b/10455629-what-the-hell-just-happened

In the Spring of 2012 I embarked for 5 weeks on Monhegan Island in Maine as a recipient of the Monhegan Artist's Residency program. Here is the work created during this residency. It is a collection of drawings and silk screen prints. Each morning I typically created a small drawing, followed by a day of screen printing. The bulk of my time was spent exploring silk screen printing using the very basic techniques of cut paper and "Drawing Fluid" stenciling.

From February 14 to May 9, 2020 I painted in a 60-page sketchbook. The start date was of no significance other than it was time to start a new sketchbook after completing a previous one. As the Coronavirus began to spread, my sketchbook began to feel its influence. By the time I completed filling this sketchbook I realized that it contained a visual diary of sorts that captured imagery that expressed for me, some of the anxiousness and anxieties I was feeling, as things were initially dismissed, gradually became lethal and then finally became full blown. My ongoing imagery morphed and new motifs were added and transformed by it.

The ink drawings in this collection, for me represent the end game of a brief session of artmaking that occurred between election day 2020 and Inauguration day 2021. The idea to make black and white works after painting with lots of color previously started innocently enough. I had just randomly been shuffling things around in my studio and found a pad of Sumi paper that I had purchased years ago but had never really cracked open. I'm getting so now that I like to just run through a pad of paper from beginning to end. It becomes a series of sorts, if only, in that whatever comes out of proceeding this way produces work that is all the same size or scale and on the same kind of surface. For about a decade starting in the early 90’s I had drawn a lot with Sumi ink, but it was always in conjunction with watercolor paint and on a cold press watercolor paper not on Sumi paper. I had bought this pad thinking that I might try it, but then a newfound fascination with opaque gouache watercolor paint distracted me for another decade and I never really did anything with Sumi paper until this past fall.

Though the discovery of the Sumi pad was a chance occurrence, I knew immediately that I was ready for it. For the last four years I had been creating colorful depictions of our president, hesitantly at first, but gradually, grudgingly these depictions or inclusions proliferated in my work. I felt that I could finally stop depicting the president after the election results even though I knew that things were obviously not over. “Stop the Steal” was the new animal and it created a knot in my stomach as I transitioned over from cerulean blue twitter birds, golden yellow hair do’s and fire engine red neck ties to defiant muscular characters and a revival of the flag draped coffins that I had first painted after the second Gulf War. Here were throngs of die-hard supporters, who, it felt to me, were fighting a losing battle, a battle that was starting to look like it would take us all down. It was truly depressing!

Free from primary color palette that produced all of my Trump tropes and on to parades and burly protests, the prospect of dropping back to the monochrome explorations that black ink would provide me, it felt like an opportunity to think in a less distracted and vibrantly emotional way. The election had happened, but resistance was festering. I could feel the darkness descending. We were definitely in a societal transition and the air was thick with the hot acrid breath of confederacy and supremacy. What were the aspects of this post election campaign, stripped of its red, white and blue fanfare that could be seen through the murky lens of Sumi ink? From the perspective of my drawing table it was dark, shiny and smoky.