“If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint it.”
-Edward Hopper

Cardinal Song
oil on board
20" x 16" (51 x 41cm)
(28" x 24" framed)
SOLD

Cardinal Song' is a scene set at the edge of the earth, way up high, where cardinals perch to whistle their distinctive call. Flightlines zoom through the scene with the earth reaching up as a tree trunk to touch the sky - uniting heaven and earth.

In the morning I can hear a cardinal singing out my studio window. Two blocks from Times Square, it is miraculous they are here - there are also plenty of sparrows, flocking pigeons and sometimes a Mockingbird.

Birds are special to me - I raised cockatiels, parakeets and finches with my Dad in high school. Birds appear in many of my paintings.

This painting expresses my love of birds, their majesty, and Me as a tree, reaching up to catch a glimpse after hearing their song.

Rhythmic scratching contours much of the scene -connecting the surface with the picture depth. All is interconnected, with figures blending into the background and back again.

Update: I wrote this in Summer of 2020, and at the end of September we saw a Peregrine Falcon eating a sparrow…
Even Starlings don’t come around anymore. Only pigeons, and they don’t fly in formation any longer.

Grey Opal
24" x 30" (61 x76cm)
oil on board

Quiet and unassuming, white paintings radiate elegance.
Like a Seurat painting of colorful dots, a flurry of hues melt into an opalescent grey.
Within a fractured, crystalline geometry, clear colors flash like a pearl.

Here is a detail, a possible frame, and a photoshopped room.

"The world is your oyster, but you have to put up with the sand to make a pearl."
"No grit, No pearl" - Anonymous

Finding A Pearl Too Big to Bring Home
pencil on paper
11" x 8.5" (28 x 22cm)

Such a dilemma!
What a divine problem!
The irony of finding a pearl too large to bring home.
…Soo big it won’t fit in your luggage...

Life's travels present unimaginable treasures.
…Oh to capture a moment,
reignite surprise & wonderment,
possess a cloud…

...and let's say you could bring it home...
Where would you put it!?!

The sad face.

Holding the pearl.

I would never be able to ‘illustrate’ this subject.
Is it even an experience I had?
It is an expression, a feeling I have felt.
…and in a way a bit of humor…
It represents a turning point in a story, a peripeteia.

"At that moment when, like a pendulum at the end of its trajectory, everything seems to become motionless." -André Lhote

Refugees
Latex on paper
20" x 16" (17" x 13" image)

 Lines of struggle trudging from a colorful past 
through a muddy, ugly reality 
to the hope of a better future.

Strident lines of joyous color work their way through a grey murky ground.
The angles point forward in consistent arcs laboriously forward.
When I first made this work, it was ugly to me.
The subject is grave.
Refugees are just like us
… a disaster away …

“Its the not the destination, it's the journey.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shadow of Enlightenment
oil on linen
54" x 69" (137 x 175cm)

I see a royal presence here floating through life's complexities.
To feel connected with the divine is to be blessed.

Making this large canvas, it dawned on me that ‘enlightenment’ might cast a shadow.
Obscuring places that seemed clear before enlightenment.
Maybe hypocrisy, information bias, Begging the question.

Does this painting communicate this complex concept?
No, It merely conjured these thoughts in me - and I thought it interesting to convey.
As with all my paintings, I want the viewer to see with their imagination.
One day you will see one thing, another day something else.

The framed image is a photoshop suggestion, as is the installation view to show its approximate size.

Addendum:

In Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he reasons that
the nude distracts the viewer from contemplating beauty by arousing lust.
He calls this power ‘the charming’ that lures the beholder away from pure contemplation, his ideal state.

Representation ranges in communication
from explicit,
to suggestive, 
to non-objective,
to indecipherable.

Interpretation can make the non-representational meaningful. as with scholar rocks.

“What Comes From The Heart, Goes To The Heart.” 
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet c.1750