More on Biography as an Artist
The work I have pursued for the last four decades is rooted in my early love of the American and European abstractionists of the forties and fifties. The direction and ongoing tenor of my painting was deeply influenced by my upbringing in a sophisticated social environment that exposed me to contemporary art, architecture, music (especially jazz), and design, as well as the art of the past masters.
My study of abstract calligraphy in Japan further developed this foundation. During a stay in Kyoto in the seventies, I studied an abstract form of sumi (black carbon-based ink) and brush writing called Shoudo. I came back to the studio and began exploring the expressive possibilities of the Asian calligraphy brushes (some very large) with sumi. I worked from the human form, developing a unique process in which I collaborated with a model moving to music, asking him or her to stop in mid-dance, and used brushwork to express the inner and outer lines of the form.
Simultaneously, I felt the need to continue drawing with pencil, charcoal, and ink from life: specifically, more work with the human figure, the face, and occasionally other subjects of the natural world. Throughout the seventies and eighties, the sumi brushwork became more of an inner expression of my own perception, while my drawing gave me a deeper understanding of the physical form of the subject itself. I began to combine these two media in the same piece, which allowed me to integrate the outer aspects of my subjects with a representation of the emotions they evoked from me.
Throughout this time I balanced my brushwork practice with abstract color composition, working primarily in oil.
Finally, in the later eighties and into the nineties, I continued to experiment with combining different media, drawing on a method of the Italian Renaissance painters. Traditionally these painters created the highlights and shadows of a composition with a neutral earth tone, before applying color by layering translucent glazes. When water-based sumi is dry, oil-based paint does not disturb it, so I found this technique effective when integrating color with my basic black ink design. I discovered that I could maintain the sumibrushwork bones of the composition, while integrating color in a way that married the two elements to create a dynamic visual relationship.
From 2002 to 2008, I explored a totally different approach. I gave my attention to creating abstract color compositions on paper, often on a very small scale, and allowing a longer period of sustained development for each piece. These pieces were rarely dependent on the foundation of an initial dominant brushstroke, but the calligraphic line sometimes remained present as a playful and rhythmic element instead. They were more deeply informed by my earlier oil color compositions.
By 2009, the study of complementary primary and secondary colors was at the center of my ongoing development. Because the eye sees the comparative relationship between two colors—rather than experiencing them as unvarying absolutes—I found that I could track the transformation of a single color in a calligraphic line moving from one background to another. Interested in the overall effect of a painting on the eye and the emotions, I created with the aim that the viewer could experience the work as pure sensation in the body.
The entire 2002-2008 period of compositional work—and the exercises in color relationships that followed—represented a major exploratory divergence from years of devotion to expressive sumi brushwork, and a crucial step toward my current large-scale work.
My recent work—the Rhythm and Movement series—brings together what I explored in an earlier period of large-scale color relationship pieces with a conscious return to the ongoing influence of movement and music on my work. My convoluted path here has given me a rich repertoire of techniques (both Eastern and Western, traditional and contemporary) to draw on in manifesting these ideas visually. I am reintegrating the expressive brushstroke technique that I disciplined over decades of earlier work, but in a different medium with different properties and possibilities. Returning to the very large sumi brushes, but now using them with acrylics, I combine the brushstroke foundation of my work—taking on a new energy from the period of rhythmic play in the 2000s—with color variations and other abstract visual elements, occasionally including oil and metal leaf.