My paintings reflect the voluptuousness of the overlooked. I chose oil paints because they are creamy, vibrant, rich, fat and wet. These are some of the adjectives Hildegard of Bingen uses to describe the activity of Spirit. Working from photographs I’ve taken and sketches to simplify I focus on the colors and values and begin to paint. What the photograph so easily “captures” and “takes” I try to liberate onto the surface starting with palette knives to give a general structure and preceding to brush work for further development.

AND, I enjoy the immediacy of the drawing line, even the scribble. Its connection to writing and scrubbing, care-less-ly, with abandon; hastily; with urgency: 

There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled….

There is nothing more pathetic than caution

When headlong might save a life,

Even, possibly, your own.”     Mary Oliver

I’ve painted a series of snow banks from my street in winter. I admire the marshmallow forms and the layers imposed by freeze-thaw cycles, creamy confections studded with gravel.

In spring I began a series called “Ditch Love” which is of the water, rocks and living creatures abiding in the ditch beside the road. Daily I walk this road with my dog. Her alertness and attunement informs my seeing. However, I am not an objective receiver or capturer of information. I carry within me “the wild”, as writer Kurt Hoelting expounds. So, perhaps what is liberated and saved is this “wild” in me. 

Water, rocks, the music they make and their ubiquitous presence has sustained me from my youth along the St. Lawrence and Raquette rivers and the creeks that feed them. Now they support me in their incarnations in the Catskill Mountains, close to home in my elder years. 

I want to be intimate with the watershed that sustains me and I strive to be a watershed disciple (Ched Meyers) or apprentice to the wild (Kurt Hoelting) in a love that reciprocates. I invite you to join me.

Two renditions of Rendezvous at the Convent, oil, drawing oils and pencil on cradled board, 12” x 12”