Process

Most of my works begin in narrative. My current research and meditations are stories taken from folklore, religious texts, and ancient Christian and Jewish texts. From my meditations I seek to find parallels between the issues in the narrative texts and my experience of the narratives around me. The connections may be obvious: similarities in the events, settings, or characters. More often the parallels are on a mythic, psychological, or spiritual level. For example, the medieval story of St George and the Dragon while certainly having the signs of a fictional fairy tale also has a symbolic relationship with the masculine struggle of mastering anger in the context of a romantic relationship.

After approaching the individual who will become the subject of the painting, we enter into an extended period of dialogue. The model and I go over the contents of the text or narrative, draw observations from it, and share stories from our history that relate. We also explore possibilities for the pose, the model's dress, and the setting. Deliberately, we will not have worked out all the technical aspects of the pose by the time of the modeling session. Instead, I want the model to have come to a place of intimate association with the dynamics of the story, and all of the memories, emotions, and thoughts that have become connected to it. Then, in the modeling session, the model is given some freedom to express, letting the narrative incarnate itself through the movements of his figure and face. The art object then is intended to become a documentation of his experience.

Genre, historical references, scale, color, and media will all have been selected to support the subject's expression. Our current cultural landscape is filled with multiple cultures, traditions, and beliefs that are all being retranslated through new technological modes of communication. The work makes use of traditional western materials and techniques, with value for mastery and craftsmanship. However, I have tempered this western sense of mastery with the eastern Sumi-e evident hand of the artist through the love of interpretative mark making, pleasure of material, and the meditation of space. These elements are then set in a context of modernist compositional elements as influenced by the camera. With this eclectic combination, I attempt to describe a contemporary male experience affected by multiple historical, contemporary, and cultural influences.

At this time, oil on panel has been my media of choice. As a media, its history in the west is a rich one, full of both experimentation and time-honored tradition. For each art work, or works in a set from a single narrative, I will seek out painters whose sense of, color, light, and mark seem to resonate most with the content of the piece. Their work in turn inspires my own. My experience in the studio then becomes a time of learning. Meditating on the primary narrative in dialogue with another human life and drawing from historic aesthetics in paint, my own horizons are broadened, and hopefully, the created art object will be, part history, part documentation, part its own living narrative.