White Barn
Oil on canvas 18" x 60" (click image to enlarge)


NEWS / FEATURES ARCHIVES:
2008 IAP Tour & Today Show
2007 IAP New England Tour

View of North James Street, Rome, NY (detail)
Oil on panel 6" x 9". Click to see full image.






P & C Parking Lot, Rome, NY
Oil on panel 6" x 9".

Updated December 2010

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Rome Residency, June '09
• Visiting Artist, West Chester University
• My Project in Chinese Internet Forum
• Fall 2008 Tour & Talk at Boston University
• Featured painting

COMING UP IN 2009:

Florida Painting Workshop: "Small-Panel Oil Painting for Artists on the Go" - November 7 at The Cultural Center at Ponte Vedra Beach. I may be giving other workshops or presentations that week. Contact me or the Cultural Center for details.

Fall Tour: To be announced

To learn more about the my Itinerant Artist Project (IAP) tours and presentations, check out the IAP section of this site.

HIGHLIGHT DETAILS:

ROME RESIDENCY, June '09: I just got a medal in the mail from the mayor of Rome, NY, where I was honored to be the first artist in residence at the city's arts center (RACC). "Too bad it's not Rome, Italy," I'd joked after receiving the invitation last year. But in fact I much prefered going to a small city in central New York. My first week there proved to be one of the most rewarding of my career. Click here for a full account and more images from my stay.

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Visiting Artist, West Chester University, April '09: Giving presentations about the Itinerant Artist Project has become one of the most rewarding aspects of the project. It's a treat to meet people who are interested - and a privilege to help provoke the sorts of conversations that result. For some reason it’s especially gratifying to be invited to talk to a Philosophy class. Thanks to philosopher and poet Ruth Porritt for inviting me back to WCU and for setting up a series of discussions with students, faculty, and members of the arts community.

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Featured Painting: Shown at left is a detail of White Barn (larger view), which I painted and sold in 2001 but recently had the chance to spend some time with, when the St. Ann's Home (Rochester, NY) let me borrow it for an exhibit. Becoming an itinerant artist in 2000 reinforced my tendency to favor small panel paintings, but I occasionally do a large canvas (especially on commission). White Barn is one of my favorites.

Two painters whose work caught my interest fairly early in childhood were Rothko and Wyeth - an odd combination. And I've stuck with landscape painting partly because it lends itself to an integration of abstract expressionistic and representational concerns. My humble goal for White Barn was to bring some of the simplicity and gravity of Rothko to the painting of an actual rural scene...

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Chinese Internet Forum Discusses IAP: During a recent Google search for "itinerant artist project" I found the Christian Science Monitor article about the project being discussed on a Chinese website. A friend, Stephanie Schubmel, who lives in China, was kind enough to make the following translation of the forum postings: (click here for pdf file).

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Fall 2008 Tour & Talk at Boston University: The chance to see my former grad school advisor, Richard Raiselis, and talk to his painting class were among the highlights of my Fall '08 art tour. To put it plainly, it's nice to be around long enough to find that a difficult young advisor can become both a more genial soul and an outstanding painter. Some of his paintings of Boston are among the best cityscapes I've seen. BU is lucky to have him.

The tour was a short one, and geographically focused in the SW suburbs of Boston, where I got to stay with editors from the Christian Science Monitor and an old college friend… whose life in business consulting is, outwardly, about the diametric opposite of mine. I liked that we were able to connect non-superficially, anyway. And I liked meeting his family. Despite the morning squawks of the parakeet, their guest room gets the award for most quiet place I've stayed in a long time. I was so happy, I did an especially good painting my first morning.

Although it was too short a trip to see many people or places, I made a quick detour to visit the house I grew up in, on Pope Road in Acton, Massachusetts. I was 4 when we moved to Massachusetts and 8 when we moved away, but it's the place I consider myself to be from. It's where I developed an interest in nature, started to draw self-consciously, started to look at art, and learned the value of exploring the world (often with my older brother, John).

Forty years later, what I most wanted was to find a certain grape vine I remembered from childhood. It grew across the street and down the hill from our house, at the edge of a field. The only tasty Concord grapes I've ever found in the wild grew on that vine – in Concord, no less (the border between Acton and Concord being Pope Road). In the end... I found the vine. There were grapes. Balancing on a crumbling stone wall above a patch of poison ivy, I could just barely grab one small cluster of the blackish purple grapes. They tasted very good.

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