About the artist

Background

I am a native of Ithaca, New York where I trained as a physical anthropologist at Cornell University. During the 1980’s I became an established and nationally recognized potter. An injury brought an abrupt end to working in ceramics, and led me during my year-long convalescence to re-invent myself as a painter.

I have been painting in oil, watercolor, and acrylic since 1988. Today I teach private and group classes in those mediums from my Baltimore studio.

Recent work

My experience in ceramics is evident in much of my recent abstract painting, in the undiluted, almost “hammered-on” quality of colors, and an un-reworked surety of markings required in the glazing process.

I paint with both pigmented and metal-infused acrylics on polymer (Yupo) and on clay-coated hardboard, using multiple applications, partial removals, and burnishing to enhance the sintered and reflective effects.

On Process

Beginning a new set of ideas or techniques is always energizing. Inevitably, the ebullience matures into the eventual realization that someone else has done this work many times before. But for me, this understanding brings membership in the tribe rather than ego deflation.

I have two rather large collections on which I have drawn for much of my thematic content: beach stones and metallic scraps of “road art”, both of which derive from the actions of weather and water. Ever since my childhood days in upstate New York, which were spent literally immersed in the streams and lakes, I have sensed a fundamental beauty in the textures and shapes of these objects: the metallic and stony effects in my work are a direct result.

I paint largely in response to my attraction to natural objects, and the early emotions of my childhood experiences in rural and wild settings. I continue to be fascinated by the artifacts and bones I encountered during my studies in anthropology which influenced my work in ceramics. For over a decade I polished my technique in realism and portraiture, but unlike many traditionalists, I have always explored the fusing of intention and accident, much as I had found in the subtle metallic surprises of high-fired ceramic glazes.

I make a practice of working daily, usually on three or more works concurrently. I believe that nearly every painter, no matter what the medium or discipline, has to work through some matrix of universal “problems”: the evidence of these encounters becomes simply the work itself.