FIGURATIVE: PEOPLE

The first image shown is a self- portrait done in the late seventies. It revealed to me,
my developing style of Realism. I was not thinking of anything except looking into a mirror and trying to capture what I saw. The exaggerated forms were there, naturally and unintended.

Figurative work became more interesting and powerful as I incorporated it into more complicated compositions. I gradually learned how to use it.

FIGURATIVE: ANIMALS

I didn’t have the urge to paint animals very often. The Dog image and the Dog Leading
Sheep image were two times that I was quite compelled to, due to the circumstances.

STILL LIFE

I always enjoyed doing still life work. It gave me the opportunity to build the composition, using all the ideas I had about making Art. It also gave the opportunity to juxtapose different objects with different textures, a new and enjoyable challenge. On top of that, choosing various objects to combine, gave me the chance to suggest levels of meaning.
A painting could be ironic, humorous, or “meaningful” just from the choice of, and placement of objects.

LANDSCAPE

I was, at first, for some reason intimidated by Landscape, and it would appear as background. I was asked to do Landscapes quite often however, and I not only lost my fear, but came to enjoy them.

ARCHITECTURE

The mostly hard edges of Architecture always had an appeal, but most of the pieces
were commissioned. Nevertheless, I always welcomed the opportunity.

SHUTTLE SERIES

In 1986 when I met my future wife, and after she saw my work, she introduced me to Dr. Robert Stevenson, NASA’s oceanographer. She worked for him at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, where he received all the images coming back from the shuttle astronauts. Many of the images were spectacular to me as abstract compositions, and I made this series of paintings based on those images.

FLORAL SERIES

After the shuttle series, I was craving bright colors. I thought back to the Cardiff series and came up with a way to make bold colorful compositions within the realm of realism. I arranged jumbles of flowers, photographed them from various angles, and came up with a series of shallow depth paintings. The first I did with acrylic paint. I then blocked them in with acrylic, but switched to oil for the finished painting. This provided me the opportunity to make sure that where any color met another, that meeting was blended. This added a huge amount of work to finish each painting, but gave me the softness I wanted.

I was encouraged by several older artists to go to New York.

The first trip was with a friend. I had sublet Manny Farber’s studio, and we were both doing some work for Jack Beal. I met Chuck Close, who was working on his first oversized portraits, one floor down from Beal’s loft. I was already impressed by Beal’s paintings from the ’60s, in which he combined figures and abstract elements into powerful and colorful statements.

I began my journey into “realism” in 1976. On a trip east, I visited Beal at his upstate “farm,” where he had built a studio on the property to work on a huge project. On four 12′ x 12′ canvases, he was about to start a project commissioned by the GSA. Because of the bicentennial, a large number of artists had been given grants to make public art. His project was an allegorical history of labor in the United States, destined to hang in the Labor Building in Washington, DC. I ended up staying for a year, helping with the project.

That experience started my own exploration of realism. All the elements I was interested in were still there, with the additional benefit of really working on compositions in space. Color relationships actually became even more important. My own “realism” began, and I continued when back on the West Coast. The resurgence of realism in the art world was summed up by the “Palm Springs Desert Museum” in a show of contemporary realism.