“Seeing Red” soft pastel on Pastelmat, 7″ x 9.5″, 2026
Emotions are tricky. Some of them pull us in, until we lose ourself in some small detail.
This piece is painted using a combination of Henri Roche, Blue Earth, and Sennelier soft pastels, and is available for sale.
I am thinking about art, feeling inspired, but too sick to paint today. It’ll pass, it’s not a big deal, just a cold or virus, or whatever. The local “ick”. So I look over old work that has not previously made it into this blog that I might share, and look for some theme.
Trying times, culturally and politically, in the USA. Hard times often produce some great art – which is not any sort of endorsement of hardship or chaos, it’s just a thing that occurs. It often seems the world is burning (wildfires, warfare, social upheaval)… I guess I’ll need more hues of red, orange, yellow… maybe some organic hues, and hues of violet and magenta? I look at older works that reflect other hard times…
Returning from deployment (Desert Storm) took me awhile to “sort out”. It was strange and difficult to come home to civilian life.
Emotional pain, physical pain, cultural pain, violence, warfare, and hardship; it’s not the same sort of inspiration as I feel when I am inspired by love, or a beautiful sunrise. Painting just happens to be the way I communicate what I don’t have words for.
A lot of living, a lot of memories, a lot of inspiration – some of it quite personal, some of it less so, are reflected in a lifetime of painting. I have done most of my painting in times of hardship, sorrow, and pain, because I didn’t have language for those experiences (and few experiences of joy in earlier years).
We grow, we move on, we experience more and different and other, and we live again. I’m grateful that there have been more moments of joy than of hardship, and I’m grateful to be able to paint when I don’t have words. Hard times come and go, the art remains.
Inspired by a year of stress, this piece is the first abstract work I’ve done in pastel. Small, because honestly stress doesn’t need a boost to feel huge.
It’s time. It’s really here. I’ll be with the Geodesic Art Collective at the Black Light Art Gallery! tonight. 🙂
I’ll be presenting both new and old work, including the entire “Frenzy” collection, available for sale.
Selected work, ready to load in the car
My “Frenzy” collection (three series, each of 13 images), hidden in the brown envelopes, has an interesting back story… I will have to tell it to you one day soon. It involves solitude, inspiration, loneliness, altered states, and a whole lot of running out of canvas, paint, and finally… paper. A peculiarly intense several days of continuous painting, locked in my own head until the paint ran out, about which I may already have said enough. lol 🙂
5″ by 7″ acrylic on paper w/UV pigment, “Frenzy VIII”, from a series of 13 individual works.
“Potentially Anything” 11″ x 14″ acrylic on canvas w/pen&ink and glow 2015
Painted on a rainy late summer morning, feeling inspired by love, and life; I started this piece thinking about lush green forests, and new life, and finished it thinking about space travel, and contemplating the future of humankind, and how vast our potential is, viewed from the perspective of how much we do not yet know. It is a piece I find myself hoping communicates some sense of how each moment is potentially the seed of some future greatness, and how precious our uncertainty is on our path of discovery. The basic image is of a gravid woman surrounded by whirling motes of dust, imagination, atomic particles, or… really…anything.
“Portrait of the Artist’s Tears” 5″ x 7″ watercolor on paper 1986
One of my earliest abstractions, this small ‘self-portrait’ of the emotional climate of my life at the time remains a personal favorite, in my own collection. Â On a more trivial note, it is also the first piece I chose to upload to the new site, although I have no particular ‘reason why’. Fondness? Sentiment? Hard to say; I know I continue to value the simple lines, and powerful colors in this small piece.
