Oil Paintings

Recent...Prompted by... the knowledge of God as experienced through the feet, as well as thoughts on Hybridity

Early Celestial Reasoning #1, 9x12", oil on panel, $150.00

Baroque Tendencies, 36 x48, oil on canvas, $4,200.00

"Object 1B", 2005, oil on panel, 36x36", Property of Scott and Lisa Herndon

"Joan of Arc", 48x 60", oil on canvas, $3,800.00 "Joan of Arc" (close ups)

"Your Peace, 1,4,5", 3'x5', oil on canvas "Leo Leo Leo" 30x60", oil on canvas, Property of Amy Couch "Object 1A", 2003, Oil on Canvas, 30x30", collection unknown Early Celestial Reasoning #2,Property of Rebekah Belanger

“Meaningfullessfullness”

Painting, meaning, when I make a painting (quite often of “something” as opposed to “nothing”) there are always three parts of a relationship to consider; me (the painter, the looker), the paint (canvas, wood, oils, whatever went into making the thing), and whatever the thing is that the painting is of. This relationship is what painting is about.

There is a fourth thing, that is the looking, the viewer that completes the painting.

If I knew, really knew, what art is I would not have to paint these things. I would be done. I could get a job doing something with quantitative value. Each time I paint I hope I am making something new. I try to know less, look more at what I think I know. Each painting teaches me. The art is in the learning, the discovery, stepping into new experiences, and there is never any certainty of the result, ultimately. Sure I could paint similar images twice, but the sum of the relationships and their differences (however slight) are always new.

Painting is an intensely personal process. It may touch on other issues (politics, sex, society, gender, race, etc.) but it is always about exploring, testing the hope that there is a relationship between what is “out there“, and what is “in here“. Sometimes I get the paintings right (this is more a feeling than a cognitive judgment), sometimes I have to accept the unacceptable painting as being right also.

January of 2005

Images from the show at the Arts Center "Name, Mine", Saint Petersburg, 2005