About me
I was born and raised in Vermont, USA and now live in Massachusetts, USA.
My goal is to take a sincere, honest look at the surroundings and actions in my life and translate them through local imagery that can be understood and appreciated universally.
Here is my Artist Statement for...
I was born and raised in Vermont, USA and now live in Massachusetts, USA.
My goal is to take a sincere, honest look at the surroundings and actions in my life and translate them through local imagery that can be understood and appreciated universally.
Here is my Artist Statement for a show and series of winter paintings in 2010:
Snow-cover unifies and distills. I found this to be helpful while re-grouping from a previous series.
I’m attracted to things built or left by others that really weren’t intended to be objects to contemplate. This started with a previous stonewall series (inspired by the poet Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall") and branched off from there to woodpiles, abandoned cellar holes, surveyor’s ribbon, paths…
These were made originally for utilitarian reasons with time, labor, and thought spent creating them. However, they now evoke a deeper meaning when taken out of context either through time or viewpoint.
If, along with this new meaning they were visually striking, I felt a need to paint them, to re-purpose them. To make people aware not only of the beauty and importance of the objects themselves but to empathize with similar experiences, imagined back-stories, and the analogies they generate.
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I arrived at my current style after working for years through a series of abstract expressionist, color-field type paintings. These concentrated on color relations mostly between sky and tree lines.
After a while, as with minimalism, there is only so far one can go. I felt I was forcing the image rather than pulling it out. I went as far as I could with that series and would have been redundant had I continued. To find a clearer direction I used the fact that I’ve always wanted to be to painting as the poet, Robert Frost, was to literature. The Vermont and New England connection also seemed to help. I wanted to use the local, what is familiar to me, to connect universally. I decided to use Frost’s poems as launching pads for paintings. Not to illustrate the poems but to use them as inspiration. I set out to do this using my abstract, Color Field approach with little success. Frost’s descriptions of physical things can be so vivid. Reading a biography on Frost, I found that as incredibly inventive and original as he was, he couldn’t stand “modern” art. In a way I was relieved, so I set out on a mission to photograph the subject matter in Frost’s poems for reference later in the studio. My backyard abuts 300 acres of conservation land, typical New England woods with trails and a variety of trees. While looking for subject matter I found myself literally tripping over it. There are miles of stonewalls in these woods. One of Frost’s poems, “Mending Wall”, deals with adjoining property owners repairing stonewalls after the winter, with one questioning why they were needed. This, of course, has a much broader, global reach. I started to paint sections of these walls. These sections, when isolated from the rest of the wall, had a life of their own, with relationships developing between stones, each stone depending on the other. I also eliminated color because it was a big jump from abstract Color Fields to representing objects. The fact that the stones were mostly gray stone color helped in making that decision. The Mending Wall series led me to cellar holes, people’s woodpiles, my own backyard and other people's yards.
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thank you for the stars...your work makes winter not only bearable but beautiful..even in april;)