This winter I reworked some older paintings, in some cases creating completely new works. You can see those HERE. Another direction has emerged in the work. Mostly in a square format I have been making paintings with an all-over composition. There is motion in the paintings, sometimes reflective light, many details, but also a general gestalt. You get one painting when you look at it close up, a different one from a distance, and yet another when you move in front of it. The experience of the painting can’t be replicated in a photograph. You need to see it in person.

Every art movement, from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Symbolism, Surrealism, and Mid-Century Modernism, would not have evolved as it did without the fairly sudden and thorough inundation of Japonism in the second half of the 19th Century.

As a child I fantasized that my bedroom had a bunk bed and the room was completely filled with paper up to the height of the bed. I sat on top of the bed and filled the paper with either writing or drawings.

I’ve kept journals and sketchbooks most of my life. My sketchbooks are strangely orderly. I tend to follow a theme and work on variations of it throughout the book. Conversely, I feel challenged by what I should keep in a journal. I have journals that recount my day, others about work, separate ones for travel, and still others filled with automatic writing. Talk about “organizing your thoughts!”

I live in a rural part of upstate New York, and when I first moved here in the 1970s, it consisted almost entirely of struggling dairy farms. Most of the homes were over one hundred years old, and were frequently uninsulated. My studio is in such a building: originally an 1887 seed company (once the largest in the world).

The article explores John Coltrane's "Circle" concept, connecting jazz music to mathematical and physical principles, and how the author's personal experience at a jazz concert led to a deeper understanding of this connection.