Derrick

Derrick 6" x 4"  $110.00

The Precisionist movement in the 1920's utilized geometric angles, curves, and clean lines.  Charles Demuth was one of the first artists to use Precisionist techniques.  I like his subject matter of the American landscape which consisted of industrial themes: steamships, grain elevators, factories and towers.  There were many oil wells in north-central West Virginia over a hundred years ago.  There was one left standing on top of a hill near my home when I was little.  It was dismantled years ago.

The Boating

The Boating 6" 4"  $110.00

Monet was perhaps the leading exponent of the new mode of interpretating landscapes.  His paintings have little structure or design in the conventional sense; they suggest, rather than depict, the outlines of cliffs, trees, mountains and fields.  He was intensely interested in the problem of light.  In that spirit, I depict a couple in a canoe with bright patches of color.

Dancing Bride

Dancing Bride 6"x 4"  $110.00

About 1750 a group of immigrant painters brought with them to America a style which has generally been described as Rococo.  An essentially courtly style, it had a hard going among the colonists who domesticated it, leaving its lightness and grace.  The style imported to America still had pretensions to aristocracy but was less pompous and more natural.  I was trying to imagine a colonial bride celebrating her wedding day by bursting into an impromptu dance.  I wanted also to convey her grace, charm, and prettiness and maybe hint at her social status and cultural refinement.

German Chocolate Cake

German Chocolate Cake 6"x 4"  $110.00

Still-life has historically dealt with the realistic rendering of material objects.  The very absence of animation or ulterior meaning has permitted artists to study the structure, surface, texture, color, and illumination of physical bodies for themselves alone.  I hereby give you a piece of cake unadulterated by extraneous considerations.

Amoeba

Amoeba 6"x 4"  $110.00

Lately I began to utilize the Surrealists' automatic techniques to paint biomorphic abstractions with almost a mythic content.  That doesn't mean that I'll paint fearsome creatures from mythology.  Fascinated by microscopic life, I painted a form resembling biological life at an elementary level.  The amoeba floats in an indeterminate dark space conveying a sense of relative calm and introspection.

Red Vase

Red Vase 6"x 4"  $110.00

I wanted to make the main appeal of this painting the delicate blending of the colors graduated from red to yellow.  By carefully controlling the mix of water and paint a subtle graduation of color is difficult but possible.

The Dream Doves

The Dream Doves 6"x 4"  $110.00

This painting is just an expression of the subconscious, conveying the idea of doves in flight.

Transvision of Pisces

Transvision of Pisces 6"x 4"  $110.00

Thomas Eakins had a deep interest in outdoor life and many of his early paintings deal with rowing, sailing and bird hunting.  As a Realist with strong scientific pre-occupations, he had always to prove that what he saw was true--hence the preliminary perspective and anatomical studies and the dependence on photographic evidence to reinforce visual experience.  I tried to recreate the fine detail of a fish as if I were making a scientific photograph.  But the contradiction between the focus of studied detail and the immediate impression of visual experience creates an aesthetic ambivalence.

Ancestor

Ancestor  6"x 4"  $110.00

Even a solidly academic education and the influence of great artists do not prevent me from returning to an early obsession with this cult image.  The skulls may scandalize the more rigidly non-objective vanguard artists who may, perhaps, view this as a surrender to a pale neo-humanism.

Village on a Lake

Village on a Lake 6"x 4"  $110.00

The dominating tendency in American painting in the 1940's was Expressionism.  It is still practiced by a few distinguished American artists although today it has generally merged with abstraction.  The expressionists insisted that a painting must represent the artists' particular intellect.  They were making art a private matter, removing it a step from the public, and turning it into an intensely personal vision.

Fossil Ferns and a Lump of Coal

Fossil Ferns and a Lump of Coal 6"x 4"  $110.00

American still-life painting found limited acceptance in the latter part of the nineteenth-century, appealing neither to the sophisticated taste for the aesthetic nor to the popular taste for the anecdotal.  Yet in the postwar period there was a remarkable efflorescence of still-life painting by a host of artists.  My indebtedness to the group is apparent in the simple arrangement of the objects on a horizontal shelf-table against an undefined dark background.

Stones in a Garden

Stones in a Garden 6"x 4"  $110.00

Many persons enjoy sketching as they take a walk.  They train themselves to observe carefully and to remember what they see.  I wanted to recreate the subtle variations found in natural colors, an example of which is this painting.

Supernova Through a Telescope

Supernova Through a Telescope 6"x 4"  $110.00

In a widely noted letter of 1943 to the New York Times artists Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko declared "Art is an adventure into an unkown world. . . of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense."  Ancient myth and primitive art were thought to reveal universal symbols of the unconscious mind.  Only later did the concept of myth and the creative unconscious fuse with a new conception of the painting act itself.  This painting was meant to assert the boundlessness and the mystery of being.

Marmalades

Marmalades 6"x 4"  $110.00

Flowers have been reproduced in paintings in all civilizations and periods.  They have been a favorite subject in still-life paintings from ancient Chinese prints to such recent paintings as Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers.