Portfolio of Works

Landscapes are what I return to. There's always something to learn, a new way to render something familiar, or a new process. In some cases, I work entirely en plein aire; in other cases, from a photo, and in other case, entirely from memory. 

Some are deconstructions; that is, taking a painting or photo and re-creating just one small patch of it, rather that the scene. Pincushion Mountain deconstructions found here are an example. 

Another example are the 4 painting that are labelled "Spaces In Between." In these cases the focus was not on the objects (trees etc) in the scene, but in the spaces in between, with color used to reflect the energy.

The fun in painting figures is to use the same technique as in painting their surroundings, so its "all of a piece." 

This began as a pandemic project. When the lockdown began, I thought, "what is a topic that is easy to access?' and I immediately thought of all the birds in my vicinity. So I made a list of all the birds in and around Como Park, especially those special ones that that just migrate through, and started painting. In each image, the bird itself is a fair replication of the real thing, but the real "fun" was in the decorative background. The common motif across all of them is dots, like confetti, scattered on top of everything. 

In many cases, the decoration is redolent of some aspect of the bird.. The sky of the loon, for example, evokes the magical sounds in the night that loons make; the background of the owl is floating orbs, like its eyes in the night; the graffiti behind the crow anchors him in the city. 

The paintings were done first by pencil drawing overlaid by ink, then painted in with acrylic ink. 

Most of these images were created for a class at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design on children's book illustration. 

Sometimes we were given a sentence out of an actual children's book and asked to illustrate it without looking at the original publication. In other instances, we were told a theme, eg the alphabet.

Democracy Now! is an independent news show that airs live every weekday at 7am. Amy Goodman, the anchor, hosts for the hour, typically dividing it between 1-3 stories. Between 2009-2018 my self-appointed "job" was to watch the show and capture each of the stories. This consisted of drawing the interviewees, choosing a title, and summarizing the information concisely. My goal was to be finished by the end of the hour, but sometimes I went over. 

I greatly admire courtroom artists like Marilyn Church ("The Art of Justice: An Eyewitness View of Thirty Infamous Trials") and Janet Hamlin (Sketching Guantanamo); while there are numerous differences, of course, the one thing they consistently talk about is the role of speed; I felt that effect in my work too. While it was a constraint on the one hand, on the other it produced more power and expediency. You can't be tentative and fast. 

One day, while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal, I learned that the two dogs who'd adopted me had died. I was devastated, As I sat trying to absorb the grief and loss, the thought passed my mind, "this should be in the newspaper"; it was that big. Then I had to laugh a bit because of course not only was there no newspaper, this would not be considered newsworthy. So I thought, "I'll create my own!" and proceeded to draw a rectangle with room for a headline and three stories on a page in a children's school notebook. The headline Dogs Dead described the top drawing. Needing something for the other two squares, I drew what else happened that day; the kids' ball accidentally fell in the well (their sad story), and a neighbor wanted to show me his garden. Inadvertently, I'd reflected back to myself the fact that life goes on. 

So from that day on, I used that template to capture the events of the day. At the end of each day I closed my hut door, lit a candle or kerosene lamp, and went to work.  I had one brush and the three primary colors in watercolor tubes. Between the limited supplies, the novelty of some of the subject matter,  and the dim light, I was often surprised by the results the next morning, sometime happily, sometimes not. It was an excellent exercise to just keep painting, stay true to the process, and let the results be what they may, trusting that I was learning.