Abstractions

We offer several extensive bodies of work that have appeared in many of the shows summarized on this site and received excellent reviews.

Two primary multi-painting bodies are the Horizon Line Series and the Italian Walls Series. 

HORIZON LINES: This series of paintings strips the landscape to its most basic element - the horizon line. These neutralize many of the elements that typically lead one to read a painting as a landscape. These pieces employ a square format as it does not suggest either the figure or landscape and rely on color expression and paint quality to express, in an abstract format, the idea of the landscape.

Some of the Horizon Line series can be easily viewed as landscape, while other pieces seem to have a flatter spatial quality and function more as pure abstraction. Ironically, one of the more abstract pieces is based very closely on observation of a field of marigolds with stripes of red and green running though the field. Other paintings contain landscape orientations but are completely derived from imagination.

ITALIAN WALLS: This series was inspired by the qualities of the walls in the cities of Italy. This interest began in Venice - specifically on a trip to the outer islands of Burano and Torcello. Some small pieces are based on Torcello's bleak, weather-scarred geography as transitional paintings leading from the Horizon Line series to the Italian Walls series.

These initial paintings led to a large series of abstractions based on the walls of Italy, using extremely heavy paint and texture. Naturally, these are not literal descriptions of walls but focus on color and surface. In some respects they are also a "nod" to western culture.