Beginnings of the Fellowship Series

I'm competing for a fellowship that could help me leave the city but maintain a studio regimen. These are the beginnings of the show that will make a visual argument for my case.

The drawings and paintings I make reflect an irrepressible curiosity about the nature of my relationship to my environment. My exploration of various ways to discover and express this relationship, through visual as well as written language, began when I moved from coastal Maine to Center-City Philadelphia. I constantly wonder how much of my artistic voice may be attributed to the incessant stimulus of the city, where this voice first emerged, and how the visual logic of my work would be different should it develop or grow in a quieter or rural environment.

additional work on The Beast

I just couldn't let it sit there; I started seeing things that were wrong with it. That's what happens when you turn a painting towards the wall and look at it again 30 days later. You see things. I'm seeing things.

SOLD (March 2010)

Ode to Vision and Revision

Over the past three days, as I watched this painting change rapidly beneath my hand, I remembered the a few lines from T.S. Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock that read:

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

For everyone else, I hope there is something in this painting that lifts and drops a question on your plate. While I've come to understand that I cannot share through color and shape the conversations running in my head as I make something, I hope that the art provides a starting point for new dialogues, new questions, new debates. I hope something I've painted causes you to be curious, to remember, or to hope--that you leave a little you with the painting and take a little of the painting home.

For me, this painting is about vision and revision. The colors I used and the moments I constructed with those colors resulted from, I think, an honest sense of wonder (to use Rachel Carson's words). Wonder at color, at the way it is dispersed in nature and at the power I feel when I can choose colors. To finish this painting, I needed to take the time to look, often, and have the courage to let pieces of it fall away. The process was one of intuition, serious contemplation, indecision (about every ten minutes), joy (especially when the colors I mixed were vibrant and good), revision, and exhaustion. Today I felt satisfaction, and chose to stop here.

I dedicate the painting to the people that use their senses vigorously and joyously to explore our world!