These portfolios are groupings of paintings that suggest underlying themes that have been emerging and developing with an organic sense of connection over time. I think of them as chapters.

Recent Paintings: Paintings that have taken shape over the last five years, including new and old/new paintings. This includes paintings that have been recently resolved after being in progress off-and-on over a long period of time. These new and old/new paintings continue to inform each other in vital, compelling, and unexpected ways.

Local Implications: Paintings that evoke the local places of everyday life – the street, neighborhood, rooftops, back porch, and the studio. These painting situations are deeply familiar yet remain surprisingly open. As abstract paintings, they also speak to something even more local – an intimate sense of lived experience within one’s body, including pre-verbal observations not yet coalesced into fixed images. These can seem filmic or dance-like; they are alive and reconfiguring at the level of our synapses, embodied and experiential.

Open Intervals & Synapses: These paintings focus on tonal and spatial intervals as elements of my vernacular visual language. These intervals are stepped apart and feel like they are solid and rooted, yet open and breathing. While looking at these paintings, a palpable perceptual shift occurs as implied connections and ghost images assert an alternate read. The paintings are about the effect these intervals have on our synapses and how they engage physically and neurologically, with our process of seeing.

Ethics of Improvisation: My paintings reflect a particular attitude about improvisation, focusing on the elemental way that various parts contribute to the underlying visual statement. This involves spare and decisive editing, resulting in a concentrated economy of means in which nothing is extra, and everything is necessary. And it allows the painting to take shape through inquiry and dialogue over time.

Convex Inverse & Location Device: Some of these paintings contain portal-like spaces inserted within larger configurations, similar to the way a convex mirror reflects the place behind the viewer, spatially opening up and complicating the view.  Occasionally a painting takes on a density or force, like a mineral aspect that’s not quite visible, akin to a magnetic or even psychic charge. I am intrigued by the potential for such a painting to help situate the viewer in relation to the work and these energies, similar to the experience of looking at certain ancient icons where you feel that the painting is seeing you back. Such works have a sense of presence that continues to build and resonate through sustained viewing and there is something reciprocal about this—painting as an exchange, a two-way street.

Back Porch & Night Paintings: Certain places and times of day remain an inexhaustible source of deep sustenance for me. This goes back to some childhood experiences in the early 1960s hanging out at work with my grandfather, a projectionist at the State-Lake Theater in Chicago, and in the summers at the nearby Sunset Drive-In. Many years as a night painter have also contributed to this work. The darkly luminous buzz of evening light is charged, very alive, and powerfully resonant for me. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s the night view from my studio overlooked a freight yard which became abandoned, then sparsely populated with encampments of shanties and small fires lit for warmth. The nearby warehouses had just a few lights on in upstairs windows. I’ve painted this scene is various ways, sometimes with a title like The Many Or The Few. You don’t have to look very far to see how social and economic forces affect the landscape.

Warehouses & Water: Living and working in industrial riverfront neighborhoods for most of my life, warehouses and water show up in many of my paintings. My current home is a just a little further from the river, and it is a different river, but shadows and reflected light cutting across and through the water continue to inform my paintings in varied ways.

Conversations & Situations: Street scenes involving shared space and interactions. Several of these paintings are rooted in specific moments, often from front-step conversations with my neighbors, going back to Philadelphia in the early 1970s and continuing up through the present time. It’s strange how painting can evoke such specific moments, compressing time into a visual object, one that can somehow also open back up to resonate in the present tense, in this world of human consequences.

Neighbors & other drawings: Charcoal drawings of friends, neighbors, and colleagues from direct observation. For me this working process involves searching out and articulating the spaces between and around us, carving out solid chunks of air with the eraser. For me this drawing engagement is responsive to the person’s body language, attitude, and presence. These were done in small-group drawing sessions in which artists collectively paid a friend or neighbor to pose. Drawing a person is as old as humanity, yet to actually get at the living character of a human presence remains quite under-explored.

Little Ones: Little paintings, which sometimes feel as weighty as big ones.

Diptychs & two-sided paintings: Paintings made using two panels of differing widths so that the vertical split between panels is not in the center. Sometimes panels of differing heights are lined up at the bottom so that the overall painting has five outside corners. Included in this portfolio are some two-sided paintings on cardboard which are shown on adjoining wood panels with small shelves where the viewer is invited to handle the paintings and turn them around, recombining fronts and backs in an unexpected, interactive dialogue. These originally grew out of my old hitchhiking signs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which the name of the city I was travelling to was sometimes turned into an abstract painting that would attract a curious driver, resulting in some interesting rides and conversations.

In Situ: Paintings in relation to each other, to the immediate physical surroundings, and to our physical presence. Where they were made and where they were seen.

Source Paintings: Paintings, mostly completed, that have continued to hang on a side wall of my studio long after they were dry, just being nearby as new ones take shape, allowing old and new to inform each other. They are paintings that I may be finished working on, yet they continue working on me over an extended time.

Department of Antiquities: Some of my old work going back to the 1970s still feels weirdly relevant, as if the paintings have been telegraphing their way through to me from behind the painting wall all this time, sneaking up on me like slow-motion depth charges.