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Detail of Downtown River View, 14" x 48"
(click on image to enlarge).
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:
Landscape Lottery series exhibiting at Mercer Gallery, September 2017,
as part of the exhibit Points of Departure: Meditations on Mapping .
This international invitational is a must-see!
TOWARD A CULTURE OF CONNECTION
Just before the 2017 presidential inauguration, a friend emailed to say how disturbed he felt about America's new direction. I sent back a long response that I then turned into an opinion piece for Rochester's weekly, City Newspaper. It ran under the title Empty Culture Needs Connection.
Here's the online letter (4th one down).
Here's a pdf version.
Maybe because I have always seen my art and my art projects as part of a dialogue with the culture at large, I've tended to think and care a lot about the state of our culture. While no expert, I can say my life and thinking have been informed by a study of cultural criticism, from William Blake and H. D. Thoreau to Christopher Lasch and Adrienne Rich.
I also come from a family of activists, people who know you can't just accept the way things are and drift if you want values like justice, truth, beauty and community to have a meaningful place in the world.
It's going to take both deep reflection and courageous action to get our culture, our communities, and ourselves through the next 4 years in workable condition. I'm better at the reflection part, so sometimes I write letters.
Please send any thoughts or feedback, if you feel inclined: contact.
This past November I had the privilege of delivering a series of three talks on The Art of Connecting at the Center for Creativity, Spirituality and Justice in Rochester.
The series was primarily about my Itinerant Artist Project. After several years of giving single half-hour to hour-long presentations on the IAP, the series provided a welcome chance to explain and explore the project in more detail: influences, genesis, the experience, and variations over time.
The philosophical and cultural-activist aspects of the project took on heightened relevance in the wake of the presidential election. I have to say, it was both reassuring and highly rewarding to have a large and engaged audience for all three talks.
LATEST IAP PRINT
Shown here is Breadloaf Walk, one of the paintings done on my 2016 IAP tour, while staying with wonderful hosts in Ripton VT. When I heard the local paper would be sending a reporter out to do a story about the project, I decided I'd try to do an especially picturesque scene for the paper to print.
It ended up being the image I also used for my talk series (above). People liked the upbeat energy of the image, so I've turned it into an archival digital print.
Contact me for details or if interested in purchasing.
LATEST IAP TOURS
In September 2015, not having done a big Itinerant Artist tour for a while, I headed west on what turned out to be the longest IAP trip since the project launched in 2000. That first trip lasted 11 weeks. For the 2015 tour I was gone just as long but took a week off in the middle to do some cat-sitting (it's a long story).
The 2015 tour took me from NY to California and back, and put me through the wringer, as well. I met some great people, though, and saw some memorable places, including the Lake Erie lighthouse where I made my first stop (see photo at right)! Along with getting this most intriguing of photos, l did some of my favorite paintings from the project. A good selection, with notes, can be seen in the 2015 Tour Portfolio.
I try to average one month per year on the road with the IAP. Having done almost 3 months in 2015, I took it easy in 2016, with a short and sweet tour through the Vermont-Adirondack area. See notes, above, on the new print.
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BIRD PAINTING
Back around the age of 5 or 6, when I began to take art seriously, my main interest was birds, connecting with nature by drawing and painting birds. As I grew older, the focus expanded to landscape, the overall visual environment. Art became a realm to explore for its own sake. The sense of connection I was after could be achieved through the process of interacting with materials and nature, through expression as much as through depiction.
In recent years, however, I've grown more conscious of how much I still enjoy birds, and they have been working their way back into my paintings - often subtly, sometimes as the main subject. My new Bird Art page shows some examples.
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