In the early 1970s when I was a senior in high school in Beatrice, Nebraska, I would often end my school day by perusing art books in the beautiful old Carnegie Library that graced my home town.  There, I happened across a book called "Private View-the lively world of British Art" in which I discovered the paintings of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, R. B. Kitaj and others. I returned to the library day after day to absorb the magic I found in that book..  I immediately felt a powerful affinity for modern British figurative painting. The tradition of illusionistic figure painting was alive in the work while still honoring the flat surface of the canvas, the texture and energy of the mark on that surface, and expressions of the anxiety of life in the 20th century.

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Despite a few brief forays into abstraction and experimentation with other styles, I have remained committed to the craft of illusionistic painting, most clearly evident in the recent series of large portraits.   In these portraits, I scrutinize the terrain of the face with its shifting planes of color as they bend in relation to the light.  It's as if I'm interrogating the flesh in an effort to discover the lived history of the individual. That history is further revealed through the scars and blemishes that make each subject unique, along with strands of hair, the vitreous membranes of the eyes, and the glisten of saliva over teeth and lips.  I prefer my subjects to be unadorned - unprepared for social presentation. The subject is then described without the corrective editing required by ego or vanity.

 

Of equal importance is the physical reality of the painting itself,  the flat surface of the canvas orchestrated to create a cohesive surface with marks of oil paint, applied thick and thin, at times carefully rendered, at times roughly gestured.  The large scale of these portraits allows for a lively, textured  surface without sacrificing detailed information.

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Before the modern era (with a few rare exceptions) artists painted humans with god-like perfection, captured at a moment of perfect balance, perfect rhythm, perfect beauty, or as I have come to call it, "at a moment of grace."  I prefer to find beauty "between moments of grace". 

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