For about fifty years I’ve loved designing and building furniture but, over the last twenty-five years I’ve also been adjusting toward my painting inclinations.
In Santa Fe, I became enamored of the work of Marcia Myers and her development of modern fresco techniques. Expanding on her work, I developed nominal landscape abstractions and eventually began painting representational landscapes with a commission for five rather fanciful frescoes that now hang in the lobby of the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital (2012).
I’ve been honored to be presented by New Editions Gallery in two previous solo exhibitions of my fresco landscapes. Unfortunately, the process that I developed for my type of work was the final physical insult to my poor thumbs, worn out by all those happy years of overuse in the woodshop at the School of Art/Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky where I supplied technical support and was an aesthetic resource for 40 years. So, a new process had to be found. A couple of surgeries later, I began experimenting with acrylic tube and brush on panel painting, something that I hadn’t done much since high school. With some trepidation, I found that my new path held some promise.
The work one sees in my new exhibition of acrylic landscapes springs from a lifetime of visiting museums and galleries, observing my colleagues at UK, my observation of the natural world and most recently, my experimentation in my beloved home studio.
These acrylic paintings have been done over the last two years and are taken from photographs by accomplished friends. Though they tend toward photorealism, I look for opportunities to employ abstraction. The combination has delighted me in the short time I had to assemble the show. The acrylic works differ markedly from the frescoes that required working inside the limitations of the process, much like the early to Mid 20th Century color woodblock prints that I modeled them by. I have found that there is a greater range of detail and sophistication available using brushes than the ‘Wilton Bag’ (cake decorating bag) application of the marble dust, earth pigment and acrylic artist’s medium plaster I had enjoyed working with, but can no longer physically tolerate, for years.
After a life of moving through a series of fulfilling but, demanding disciplines, I believe this is the process that will see me through.
