Gallery of Recent Work

Work in Progress

I keep circling the problem of showing 3-dimensional space on a flat (picture) plane. Obviously, not a new concern of painters and artists. But I am fumbling my way toward a different idea about space than is found in Renaissance paintings, or even the collage artists of 1960 forward. I am looking for something that bridges the Renaissance camera's eye perspective and contemporary layered chaos. In trying to decipher what can be done with the flat picture frame, I have painted panoramas, sets of paintings meant to be kept together in particular groupings, and most recently, fractured and/or ambiguous space coalescing around a vertical or verticals. These are landscapes, first painted traditionally, then worked, in the studio, into larger surfaces with ambiguous spaces.

The panoramas are mostly located in paintings from desert regions and have references to the theories of David Hockney, Rackstraw Downes, William L. Fox, and Yi-Fu Tuan. Yi-Fu Tuan, (in Space And Place) speaks of Unoriented Space, space outside of time, without a goal. The paintings from the Amargosa desert , in particular, worked from that sense of unoriented space. Likewise, the St. Johns Bridge Panorama (partial views below) plays with a sense of space just barely tethered to the shore at either end—a sense of space almost without place.

More recently, I found myself returning to a couple of older works, having found an unexpected way to understand what I was trying to do. In watching a Ken Burns' documentary on Thomas Hart Benton, and then reading critical writing about and Jackson Pollock, I became intrigued with the way Benton and Pollock expand space; Benton in particular, paints representationally, yet without linear perspective. My writings on the theory underlying the paintings featuring fractured and/or ambiguous space can be found on my blog, here, here, and here. The Cathedral Park, St. Johns Bridge Fractured, below, as well as as Barn Memories, Barn Interior and Yachats from North Park are results of that process. The accompanying smaller paintings preceded the spatially wonky pieces and were instrumental in providing material for the more ambitious pieces.

Another chronologically organized panorama is The Amargosa, painted in an intense month of 7-hour days, 7 days a week, viewing the Amargosa Valley and desert as seen from the open barn doors of the Goldwell Open Air Museum's studio. This painting is a set of 7 linen canvases, presented cyclorama-style, and when stretched edge-to-edge is 5 feet by 28 feet .

In the section Work in Progress, the beginnings of a series featuring water -- the Oregon Coast and the San Juan Islands -- are paintings where I've used both ambiguous space and panoramic views. This is a project I hope to continue working on through 2011.