PAINTING, ACRYLIC
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Paintings that fuse text and texture, color and character, form and figure
Biography: After teaching college English for 35 years, I retired in 2022 and moved with my wife, a North Carolina native, to Fearrington Village. Before retirement and due to the restrictions and isolation in 2020 brought on by Covid, I set up a studio in my garage and, after taking an online class on Abstract Expressionism, began painting, often reworking old paintings from my earlier days. In North Carolina, I set up my studio again and have used painting as a means for exploring themes that occupied me in my professional life as a scholar and teacher of 20th-Century literature, but now using color, lines, and texture, instead of language, resources, and texts.
Artist Statement: My canvases investigate the intersection of literature and landscape and are influenced by the works of painters like Henri Matisse, Barnett Newman, and Richard Diebenkorn. Artists usually are inspired by what they see, but I am more often inspired by what I read or where I have traveled or lived. My paintings bridge the gap between the literary and the visual. Using techniques found in Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and other artistic movements of the twentieth century, I paint portraits of poets and authors, develop visual interpretations of literary passages or concepts, and insert textual and bibliographical markers as design elements. My paintings are often either abstract landscapes or large scale mixed-media abstracts, in which I incorporate cut or torn leaves from books, quotes or passages from novels and poems, lettering or type fonts, or bibliographic and (text)ual elements. Importantly, my canvases are in a conversation with the other paintings in the studio, providing a lively discussion involving text and texture, color and character, form and figure. |
