A Recent Series

Stone Boat
enamel on cradled board, 19" x 24"
$950 plus shipping.  Email for purchase.

I never know for sure where a painting will go.  This started out to be another stone painting, but evolved into a clunky, boat-like shape that I somehow liked and decided to develop.  For me there is something poignant and moving about a boat out of water.  This piece has led to several other works with boat forms, shown below.  Click on the images to enlarge.

Boating in Tokyo
Enamel on gesso-coated paper, 62" x 72"
$6300 plus shipping.  Email for purchase.

The conventional reading of space in these paintings is often subverted by various means to create a deliberately ambiguous environment.  I'm after an imaginative space, not a literal one.

The Geometry of Travel
Enamel on cradled board, 19" x 24"
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The Collection of Hours
Enamel on cradled board, 19" x 24"
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Seven See-Through Stones

Enamel on heavy gesso-coated paper, 61.5" x 72"
$6300. Free shipping in U.S.
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Click image to enlarge

Predicament

Enamel on heavy gesso-coated paper, 71" x 59"
$6300. Free shipping in U.S.
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Click image to enlarge

The Color of the World

Enamel on heavy, gesso-coated paper, 61.5" x 72"
$6300. Free shipping in U.S.
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It's always an open-ended journey with these paintings. This trip took me to a land of rich, deeply saturated color.

Celilo

Enamel on heavy, gesso-coated paper, 60" x 68"
$6000. Free shipping in U.S.
Click image to enlarge

For check payment or other arrangements, email don@dailyartwest.com

In 1981, artist Bill Viola made a videotape he called “Hatsu Yume (First Dream)”. In it there is a sequence where a fixed camera views a rock on a mountainside for a long period of time. People move around the rock, at first 20 times normal speed, then gradually slow to normal, then slow-motion. Here’s what Viola says about it:

“...What I look at in that scene is the rock, not so much the people. I thought it would be interesting to show a rock in slow motion. All that is really happening is that the rock’s time, it’s rate of change, exceeds the sampling rate (the recording time of the video), whereas the people are within that range. So the rock just sits there, high speed, slow speed...it doesn’t matter. I think about time in that way. There are windows or wavelengths of perception. They are simultaneous and interwoven at any one moment, but we are tuned only to a certain frequency range. This is directly related to scale changes in space or sound, proportion in architecture or music. A fly lives for a week or two, and a rock exists for thousands or millions of years."

Fly By

Enamel on heavy, gesso-coated paper, 60" x 72"
$6300. Free shipping in U.S.
Click image to enlarge

For check payment or other arrangements, email don@dailyartwest.com

Work in the studio continues on these large paintings in my stone series. I love the creative freedom this type of work affords me. The process is almost diametrically opposed to the controlled, goal-oriented approach of my realist paintings. I begin without a goal in mind, just applying paint very freely and intuitively with large house painting brushes. Instead of imposing an image, I try to discover one by developing an ongoing dialogue with the painting, letting it tell me what it wants to become.

At some point the shapes of the stones suggest themselves in the marks I've made, and I begin to more or less define the forms. The rock forms give me a malleable structure for the paintings that provides an anchor, or focus for the paint. I'm happiest when the final result is a balance of representational and abstract.

Many changes occur. Traces of previous colors and shapes show through succeeding layers of paint in the search for something that feels resolved. In the painting--as in life--yesterdays affect tomorrows.

So much of the impact of an original painting, especially if it is large, is lost in reproduction. I'm including this studio shot to give a sense of scale.