Each of my paintings results from a connection with the materials, specific to that painting. I usually organize the composition based on imagery that attracts and holds my emotional, rational and psychic interest. Many compositions are derived from photographs of "stilled life” that I’ve taken in cities, suburbs, industrial sites.
Since the mid-70’s, increases of retail, restaurant, and commercial businesses and structures in many US cities I’ve lived in and visited has seemed astonishingly unsustainable. Following the Depression of 2008, empty businesses with their empty sign frames have often captured my interest – because of their personalities and stories; their geometry and surfaces; their potential for transformation; and because of how they provide canvases for nature's light and shadow compositions.
As stay-at-home orders were issued around the world in early 2020, I often heard from family and friends who were scurrying out for work and necessities that the emptying structures they passed and the stillness of it all reminded them of my paintings. Venturing out on a few rare runs myself confirmed: I had been painting these Covid days for years. My visions of stillness, coexisting beneath the static noise of commercialized and capitalized chaotic spin were everywhere in The Real.
I’m comfortable recognizing and engaging with spacetime in the non-linear way it is. I’m fine with liner (human) time and whole universe slow dancing together in The Mystery. That the painting, "Next No. 19" came into being some few months before the 2020 Pandemic began; that it is so filled with life in its stillness is part of the Medicine of this moment.