A YEAR INSIDE
CONTEMPLATING THE EDGES OF MY WORLD, THE BARRIER AND THE REACH.
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THE PAINTINGS / COLLECTION
With all of these paintings there is a sense that the painting is a membrane and through these paintings you can pass into another universe… a passageway through to the other side. And the other side is really our internal world and our sense of the universe.
FROST ON WINDOW Private Collection
FREEZING POINT
WINDOW FROST
FROST IN STUDIO Private Collection
MELTING FROST
SEQUINS
NORTHWARD LYING
SILVER SUMMIT
FOREST IN FOG
“Color weakens. Gray paintings are intrinsically disquieting: They seem to introduce us to a world of dreams, of anguish, of alienation.” Picasso
To read journal entries from 2020 - 2021 click here
THE YEAR INSIDE JOURNAL ENTRIES
1 March 2020 - Someone sent me a video on the coronavirus, and it is frightening as hell. It’s from Canada, so there are at least some facts in it.
3 March 2020 - The U.S. Administration is calling the coronavirus a hoax. Now people have stopped drinking Corona beer or buying Chinese food. It feels like the world has gone mad.
5 March 2020 - The coronavirus is wreaking havoc in Washington State. Half of its residents are staying home from work.
6 March 2020 - Unsettling day in the studio. I had to leave before I ruined things.
7 March 2020 - News about the coronavirus is worsening. It’s close to home now. Saratoga has reported cases. I read today that around 43,000 people die each year from the regular flu. We aren't ready to see how many people will die from this.
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MAKING OF THE YEAR INSIDE
STUDIO NOTES
My cousin made thousands of masks for hospital workers in her town in California. She sent this one to me.
I've kept a journal forever. This year it acted as a good companion. I was surprised when I reread it for this, to discover how many paintings I abandoned or painted over. That is unusual for me. But this year it happened frequently. It was very hard to concentrate this year.
I call this the gallery space in my studio, but it is not heated. It was on these single pane windows from the 19th century that all the frost formed.
Frost in the studio.
Work in progress.
The sequins paintings don't really have an antecedent in other paintings. They relate my interest in what is real and what is an illusion and how that influences our perception.
There is nothing in my studio that escapes the paint.
Melting frost
These dark, Nordic police procedurals made our life seem a bit less grim by comparison.
Studio Selfie. I love my yellow thermal glass, but even it is not free of paint.
I use this open space as a gallery. It doesn't have much in the way of climate control. Until they replaced the roof, it rained in here.
Painting by Casper David Friedrich. The landscapes that my TV landscapes are more related to are some tiny paintings by Casper David Friedrich that I saw at the National Gallery in Washington many years ago. There was almost nothing going on in these paintings. Although I have not been able to find many of them online since, I recall them seeming to be a few gray brushstrokes making up an entire landscape. I have always wanted to recreate that quality – nothing going on and everything going on at the same time.
Any time you use a dot in a painting, it will conjure up Aboriginal Dreamtime painitings. Or Yayoi Kusama. Or Vija Celmins. Or Bridgette Riley, for that matter. My dots, like Celmins, are representational and yet, completely abstract. They are about how and what we see, and the interpretation we apply to that.
Painitng by Richter. My “TV” landscapes on the surface have a Richter-ish quality to them because they are gray and blurred. But his gray paintings are often of black and white photographs. Mine are gray because the subject is gray.