My Work

I'm never painting what's in front of me, never trying to replicate a scene or trying to make it look "realistic" or like a photograph. When I'm painting I'm always remembering the oceans and rivers and woods and faraway islands, and the souls that once lived there. I want my colors to be intense in the way memories and dreams can be so vivid. This new series is about the mercurial nature of islands (of Nature in general), the tranquil surface beauty, yes, but also the unseen truth that lies beneath that beauty. The moment before and the moment after. Life and death. Joy and sadness. And I think, maybe strangely, it’s about the people and the animals that rarely appear in my work. And all that is between then and now. Nothing ceases to exist. Certainly not my memories or my dreams. As these paintings proceed one by one they begin to take on a will of their own and evolve toward the basic elements of ocean and sky and that ever-present distant line we call the horizon. These paintings are not only about islands but also about that beautiful blue horizon – the longing to be there – the yearning for solitude and the quiet to remember what was or what could have been (see A Little Island at right and Caribbean Morning, from my latest series Islands).

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I've always worked in series of connected paintings - Falling, Africa, Illustrated Maps, and others including Blood Trail, a series of large found object installation pieces (you can see these various styles and series at the portfolio pulldown tab). I've always liked challenging myself with changes in style and content but he common thread that runs through all my work is memory. Memory of place, and imagination.

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In The Consequence of Color, I'm exploring each individual painting as it exists unto itself, apart from representing anything at all, but becoming an actual thing - like a stone or a tree or an animal or a person. You can call it "a painting" as you would call a tree a tree, but each one is different in shape and size and color and each one means something different to each different person. We see what our minds tell us to see. And when the light strikes a painting (or a tree, etc.) then again it changes everything - the consequence of light and color.

 

So many artists have influenced my work and sensibility, but probably none more than the ancient Japanese landscape artists. At the age of five I was taught to paint and draw by a Japanese artist and I knew even then I would also become an artist or better said, I think I realized I was born an artist. I lived in Japan from the age of five to seven and those memories of that little coastal fishing village have stayed with me and formed my way of seeing the world. There was so much color for me to see - the green lush mountains (see my piece in the series The Consequence of Color  titled Monkey Mountain), the reds of the boiling hot springs, the blues and yellows of the mythical statues. My series titled Falling came from a memory of a falling mourning dove I saw in those dark woods behind our house in Japan. So, other than Japan, throughout my life I've lived and traveled in many places in the world like Southeast Asia, a couple of years in Germany and two more in the South of Spain, a couple more living in West Africa (see Africa series), and then drifting and working my way through the American South and the islands of the South Pacific and Caribbean. I believe that experience of traveling and living in different countries and cultures, more than anything, has formed my sense of the world in general and landscape specifically - and my love of islands. And I'm sure traveling and living abroad led to my love of maps and my years as a map illustrator (see my Illustrated Maps portfolio).

 

And of course who has not been influenced by the great Vincent Van Gogh (both for his work and his life (see my tribute to him, Crows over Wheatfield in my oil portfolio. And for me, the one and only Francisco José de Goya's Black Paintings and his etchings of war. And the list could go on and on.

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So, after a long and happy life lived in paint I find myself still in love with the paint itself whether watercolor, acrylic or oil and whether it's representational or abstract. And still in love with all you artists out there that create your wonderful works, now and past, and more than ever still and always in love with the muse that shares my love of art, actually is my art and my heart, Christina Rosalia.