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Art Background:
I always loved to paint -- painting of any kind. When I had little
kids,
and my only available paints were house paints, I painted pictures with
house paints on boards.
My parents, grandparents and great-grandparents periodically painted
pictures, some oils and some watercolors, and my mom always painted
watercolors regularly, so it was easy for me to follow along. Although I
studied painting a little in college, I didn't get serious about painting
regularly until1987 after taking a workshop from Bill Kucha on the Oregon
coast. I also took workshops and learned about composition from Arne
Westerman in Portland, Doug Haga on the Oregon coast and Steve Memering in
Sacramento, plus my mother of course.
People tend to make scenes interesting, evoking stories, so I put
people
in many of my paintings. I love trying to capture a human gesture,
especially when it takes just the right line to do it, and especially when
faces, hands and feet are involved. I do a lot of figurative drawing in
pencil and inks.
I paint seascapes, gardens, and still lifes that are designed to get
the
viewer's eye to wander through the painting and enjoy patterns and
textures. If I'm not painting people, I particularly like painting glass
and water, emphasizing textures, reflections, distortions and shadows.
Personal Background:
After thirty plus years in the San Francisco Bay Area, working mainly
in
financial and software businesses, my wife and I moved to the Mendocino
coast of Northern California in September 2000 where I am now very happy
that I can paint and draw full time.
Affiliations:
I've been serving as the President of the North Coast Artists' Guild
since
October, 2001. I'm a member of the Board of Directors of Gualala Arts,
Point Arena CityArt, and the Watercolor Artists of Sonoma County.
My Approach to Painting:
I start with a scene or photo that has the potential for strong values
of
light and dark in patterns that appeal to me. I concentrate on patterns
of darks more than most of my painter friends. I feel like I can almost
taste the dark colors in a good composition.
The subject matter can be almost anything: seascape, landscape,
cityscape, garden, people, buildings, still life, or non-objective
abstracts -- a wider range of subjects than most painters. I don't try
for photographic realism, preferring to abstract out and emphasize the
"visual signatures" of things that enable our minds to identify what we
are seeing at a glance. This involves using a lot of textures and
calligraphy, produced with different brushstrokes, pens, knives and scrub
brushes. I tend to spend about as much time taking paint off as putting
it on as I work to get the textures I want.
I especially like doing water and glass, shadows, reflections and
distortions. I'm trying to improve on paintings of people in active
situations, especially faces, hands and feet with meaningful
gestures. Unlike most watercolor painters, I like the hard lines I get
with wet on dry or dry brushing just as much the flowing, fuzzy edges of
wet-on-wet watercolor.
Regarding color... I use a lot of muted colors, heavy on grays and
earth
tones, and seldom use intense colors. I much prefer transparent and
sedimentary paints over staining paints. Last year I finally took all the
commercial greens off my palette, preferring to mix each unique green
separately, usually incorporating earth tones and gamboge with multiple
blues. I never use white and seldom black, and no resists, salt or
alcohol effects.
Favorite painters: Rembrandt, Francisco de Goya, Valentin Serov,
Edouard
Vuillard, Andrew Wyeth, Lucian Freud, and Arne Westerman.
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