In my own words.
I’m an artist whose style is contemporary realism. I have been painting for decades and my work really tells the story of my life. It all began in NYC where I lived for over twenty-five years. It was there where I painted and taught art at Trinity School.
My city paintings were mostly black. NYC paintings were Upper West Side, people sitting on benches on Broadway, kids in a playground, my students, people on the bus and on the train and in Central Park. I also made graffiti paintings and kids on the street taught me everything I needed to know about how to use enamel spray paints.
Those paintings were broadcast on Channel 7 News and hung in the windows of FAO Schwartz. Other paintings were showcased in other fifth Avenue windows. A well known family in New York, the Straus Family, bought two of those NYC paintings and one, “Brunch at Brews,” became part of the permanent collection at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. The other, “Broadway 80’s,” they told me, went to the Neuberger collection in upstate New York.
I traveled the world. Along the way, I picked up new inspirations and insight.
Many summers I was in Cape Cod and my palette changed to include a lot more color. Many Cape Cod galleries as far up Cape as Provincetown to Heritage Plantation in Sandwich showed my work.
In 1983, I took a trip to Japan for two months using an itinerary I set up with Julia Meech, Metropolitan Museum of Art Former Curator of Far Eastern Art.
That trip inspired many landscape paintings, the first of which was a kimono shaped triptych landscape of Mt. Koya. Julia bought that painting for her private collection.
Using the triptych format suggested body shapes and in subsequent paintings I used the body shapes that I draped with actual clothing, stuffed in appropriate places, and called them my Adam & Eve Series.
In 1993, I moved to San Diego, CA where color exploded all around me. Stars were visible at night, the sky was the best blue I had ever seen, and stuff was growing everywhere in pure primary colors. The brilliant birds and dramatic cliffs still inspire awe in me.
Another series of dancers evolved after visiting Barcelona and a flamenco café in the 90’s. While there I went to the flea market and was drawn to the shiny bathroom fixtures. When I came home, I was painting faucets and dancers. It took some time to figure out how to put the shine onto the faucets. The answer came at Pep Boys where I bought automobile enamel paints.
From time to time, I like to dip back into family photos and use them as my models.
Like the Duracell battery, always charged and ever going, I continue.