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The Art of Painting
"Painting The art of protecting surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic." Ambrose Bierce
Painting has always been my first love and I have always tried to paint things to look like things and people to look like people; abstract painting and conceptual art leave me cold.
"I know I'm considered conservative, old-fashioned, but does everyone have to invent some whole new kind of music?
Can't some of us complete existing ideas well?
Some artists complete an era, some artists begin the next."
Johann Sebastian Bach
It is improbable that I shall make a noticeable impact on contemporary art because I have no great desire to shock. Ever since the invention of the camera, art has felt the need to shock as though that were the only way it could justify itself or be noticed; it is too easy simply to shock.
There is a quality of experience in front of a painting that is profoundly different from a photograph. One of the problems of trying to exhibit paintings in a medium other than the original, is that they become reduced by that other medium. I will never forget the moment I first stood in front of a painting by one of the American Super-Realists, in the 1970s. I had seen photographs of it before but the impact of the original was overpowering. There was no mistaking, even from a distance, that it was not a photograph; it was not - and could not - be produced by mechanical means.
"a world of made is not a world of born." e.e.cummings.
Accuracy and faithfulness are not the same. It is the camera's job to be accurate, it does not know how to be faithful. In painting I try to be faithful to my experience of this world and the people in it.
Unfortunately the images you see on these pages have been reduced through the mediums of photography and the internet but I hope they convey enough that you may want to see the originals.