ENVIRONMENTS & THE FIGURE
Many years ago I wrote, “The audience can never know the artist’s experience, only the honest object in front of them. In that object they may, with enough interest and imagination, choose to invest themselves. Once the original events are over, they no longer count unless the artist has manipulated them into a lively enough fiction to sustain themselves, unless they can breathe on their own.”
I still hold to that. As you can see in this gallery, in my Retrospective gallery and my River Inn Suite, the human figure and its environments have most often been my chosen subject matter. Life’s sensual, erotic and enigmatic nature is at the heart of my vision. Composition, the central, elemental concern in my work, I have utilized in building a balance between the thematic images and a formal, visual geometry. I believe that with this balance, the fictional life of the artwork, its future, is set into motion. This is the achievement of the great artwork that has inspired me from the beginning. Painters: Rogier Van Der Weyden. Jan Van Eyck. Johannes Vermeer. Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio). Edgar Degas. Andrew Wyeth. Edward Hopper. Antonio Lopez-Garcia. Richard Diebenkorn. Film Directors: Ingmar Bergmann. Alfred Hitchcock. Akira Kurosawa. Bernardo Bertolucci. Ridley Scott.
My chosen settings have always been from the real world, the world of every day life and I believe this is the gravity I have given my work. Filled with symbols of a personal history, the people and settings are intentionally set into a silent and open narrative, able to be interpreted by each viewer, from their own experience. For me, as the artist, real time is transformed into fictional time. They carry in them a lot of art history and tradition, yet are speaking to the contemporary human experience. And, being paintings and drawings, they are also very much about the nature of, the craft of painting and drawing.
