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.
