Three columns bear the weight of my artistic edifice.
1. William Carlos Williams wrote the following line in a poem titled “A Sort of a Song”: “(No ideas/but in things)”. My artistic activity centers on Things. I am interested in the whole of the Thing used and the potentialities which radiate from that Thing. I am interested in the Thing’s particularity…its physical presence…its ontological presence…the indications the Thing generates or reflects in its cultural setting or as a result of its passage through time…and so on. I am not averse to Ideas. In fact, I love Ideas. They exist as radiations of Things…mental abstractions to which the Thing itself cannot be reduced. And so, I am a realist. I serve the Thing so that the Thing may speak for itself and of itself or in juxtaposition with another Thing. Even more specifically, within the genre of realism, I am inclined toward trompe l’oeil painting as this sub-genre endows the Thing painted with a reality akin to that of the very Thing itself…the reality of existence. I love Things…and I love the Ideas that are the brainchild of a Thing’s meeting with a mind, whether individual or collective.
2. Composer Anton Webern, a student and follower of Arnold Schoenberg and a vital member of the Second Viennese School, once commented that the most significant work of art was the “Our Father” (“The Lord’s Prayer”). He meant by this that the “Our Father” expressed the most profound depths of the human soul but did so with a directness and a clarity that might seem at odds with an approach to such profundity. An approach to the ineffable with a directness that is almost blasphemous. I seek to express that which is most profound in my experience, and I seek to express it with a clarity both in technical and conceptual terms that allows for the expression to be apprehended…content and the craft that gives said content utterance. That does not always mean that the apprehension, because clear, becomes superficial or easy, but once the key of apprehension is found, I hope to impart to the viewer an aesthetic experience that is much like one’s first breath upon stepping outside on a cold, clear winter morning.
3. I was born in Akron, Ohio. No matter how much I tried to deny that reality during much of my younger life, I have come to accept that fact. Some say that one can never return to the place from which one hails. It is my experience that one can never actually leave. And so, I have chosen to accept that reality. I have chosen to make that reality a central part of my artistic endeavor. I want my suburban, everyday reality to be the portal to the ineffable…the seeming detritus of my American culture repurposed for those with eyes to see.