For me art is a personal odyssey; a vehicle to carry me forward and find some deeper unity in what is happening in and around me. I�ve never expected my art to overtly carry my political concerns. Art is a slow burn, working its gift on individuals. It is based on memories arrested in liquid space. I want my paintings to be a haunted living presence that reveals to the viewer passion, intellect, mystery and that change with each day�s new light.
My work is experiential, non-formulaic. Painting is a belief system that asks what Borges states as ��a momentary act of faith that reality is inferred from events not reasonings�. That theories are nothing but stimuli: that the finished work frequently ignores and even contradicts them.� We all do that which is a thrill to us.
The artistry is in portraying the depths of one�s soul. Where has one�s art led them to? What�s to be shared? One of art�s chief functions is to resist the denaturing forces that are always present; those things that would take away our transcendent possibilities and turn us into stereotyped beings. Art is not the production of meaning but the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world. Octavio Paz said that art turns the viewer into an artist. Great art is a freedom giver, offering one a sense of the breadth of one�s own possibilities, of what may yet be accomplished.
Most of this work was produced since I moved to Stapleton on Staten Island, New York City in the summer of 2004. After living in downtown Tribeca for nearly 30
years, I and my wife Beverly Peterson made the "Crossing" and adopted the surprising environment of Staten Island. Staten Island has informed and enriched my art and allowed me to pursue a new way of working expressed in this body of paintings.
What�s exciting now is how all these images from my past are being restated in a new way, how I have access to their original content with a new understanding of how they can continue to speak for me in paint. For me, there needs to be an epiphany, a trace of how the imagery conveyed thru paint was discovered and experienced by the artist. Not a graphic notation of the language of experience but the mystery of it. I work primarily in oils on canvased wood panels and in gouache on paper.
Once Along The Hudson II, 2007, 18 x 18 in, oil on canvas
She Awakes, 2007, 16 x 12 in, oil on canvas
Doubt Of Columbus Continued - Down to the Waters Edge, 2007, 14 x 18 in, oil on canvas
Reynolds Family Totem, 2007, 16 7/8 x 13 1/8 in, oil on linened panel
Rain Maker, 2006, 18 x 14 in, oil on canvas
Reynolds Family Totem, 1998, 10 x 8 in, graphite on paper
Escape To Shaolin, 2007, 15 1/8 x 17 1/8 in, oil on canvased panel
Petey Walks On Water, 2007, 21 x 18 3/8 in, oil on linened panel
The Sinking, 2007, 16 x 20 in, oil on canvas
The Outing, 2006, 18 x 24 in, oil on canvas
Fathers, 2007, 15 1/4 x 18 1/4 in, oil on linened panel
Under Nirvana III, 2007, 15 7/8 x 15 5/8 in, oil on canvased panel
All Images are Copyright 2006 - 2007 Galerie Cerulean and Abstract Art Online. All rights reserved.
