tomorrow...

...is my wife's birthday.
Happy Birthday, honey, and thanks for everything, as always.

Driveway

1997-9, oil on canvas, 66x78in.

One of the biggest paintings I've ever made, after a friend gave me this collossal set of stretcher bars he'd salvaged from his job as an art mover. I think they'd belonged to Jim Dine or somebody and he was tossing them. Anyway, I worked on this for a few years, at about the same time I was working on the smaller still life paintings. This was kind of a machine for me, a synthesis of the memory-based landscapes and the observational still lifes, and while making it I was thinking all the time of Matisse's large decorative works from the early teens or so.

The image is a scan of a slide, which doesn't always work too well, I've found.

Still life, late 90's

In the late '90's, I threw myself humbly into still life painting, working toward that clarity of color and light, and straightforwardness of technique, that I'd learned to admire so much in the early Impressionists. The Cezanne retrospective in Philadelphia helped, too.

The above is from 1998, oil, about 24x30in.

Pink, 1997, oil on canvas, 16x11in.

White Irises, 2000, oil, 36x26in.

Skull with Lemons, 1997, oil, 18x20in.

Tulips in a coffee can, 1996, oil, 24x20.

Blue Hydrangeas, 1997, oil, 14x11in. Private collection, Mexico.

Big pinks, 2000, oil, 30x30in.

Walnuts, eggplants, flower, 1997, oil, 18x20in.

African daisies, 2000, oil, 36x26in.

White flowers, 1997, oil, 20x18in.

More old paintings, circa 1995

Grey still life (1995), 24x28in.

Backyard (1995), 24x28in.

Night car (1995), 20x24in.

Tulips (1995), 24x20in.

House (1995), 24x28in.

All these are oil on canvas, painted not long after grad school, working through some of the de Kooning and Diebenkorn influences, but also starting to look toward more traditional, perception-based paintings, strongly influenced by my job as a guard at the Metropolitan. In particular, there was a huge and beautiful show there, Origins of Impressionism, which focused on the early work of the French Impressionists, and which would lead me to spend a few years painting outdoors and from still lifes in the studio, working toward toward a clarity of light and color and a directness of technique. Examples of that stuff to come, too.

With these, the landscapes are done from memory or imagination, the still lifes from direct observation. The grey still life was especially a response to the still lifes in the Origins show, while the tulips, which are now in my mother's house, was more a synthesis of observation and abex technique. The house an example of that, too, strongly influenced by de Kooning's so-called highway paintings of the fifties. The car more of a mood piece, and the backyard from a strong childhood memory. The backyard painting is in a private collection in San Francisco, the house in a private collection in Colorado, and the grey still life was used as a promotional poster for an arts series at my undergraduate school, Wittenberg University.