Brooklyn is one tough place to see the night sky from.
I am fortunate that I spent much of my childhood beneath an unpolluted night sky in rural Virginia. It is my memory of that overwhelming field of glowing stars that inspires paintings like Dark Sky (above) that I make here in my Brooklyn studio.
It’s a personal [...]
There is something resonant about a grand landscape space presented on a tiny sheet of paper. It’s not just the magic trick of making something small read big– though that is fun. As Jake Berthot once pointed out to me– small scale implies distance, so a small scale painting of a distant landscape benefits from [...]
This was a fun project: my friend Vanessa Mikk (a.k.a. CheapGirlDraws) has been sending specially prepared Moleskine notebooks out in all directions in a sort-of expanded-sketchblog-slash-exquisite-corpse mail-art-experiment. The idea is that each artist does a sketch and then passes the notbook along to someone else, either by hand or by mail. I was honored to [...]
I first encountered the second story meeting room at the Brooklyn Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends during a wedding a few years ago. More recently, I’ve been there with Callie as she progresses toward becoming a seminary student and a chaplain. It’s a special room. Unassuming in every way, the strongest sensations [...]
The painting now known as “Penumbra” was first exhibited in 2004 with the title “Will o’ Wisp.” It is one of a series of paintings inspired by visual phenomena experienced while walking in the forest at night. The optical range of the painting was extended in 2009 by a reworking that included significant amounts of Palladium [...]
The recent work has often required a full measure of patience along with a willingness to allow radical change. Begun in 2004, by early 2008 this was a dark canvas that had seen three different studios. Maybe clear fall sun streaming through the skylights inspired a different potential. After nearly four years, it took just [...]
Dieu Donne is showing work created for their annual benefit auction at their Chelsea gallery. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, September 18, and the show will run until the auction on October 14. Complete details on the Dieu Donne website.
This drawing, made on some of Dieu Donne’s own lovely handmade paper, will [...]
In chapter four, Elements, of his book Wind, Sand, and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tells the story of his encounter with a blue storm: a violent, cloudless wind storm. He describes the color of the sky viscerally:
On this particular day I did not like the color of the sky. It was blue. Pure blue.
A hard [...]
This painting was finished in early March, 2008. The changes in the week or two right before that point were pretty dramatic. It had been a dark painting for months. The inspiration right at the end came from a very beat up street tree that I walk by every morning between the house and the [...]
“The Maiden” is a small panel that was begun during a residency at the Millay Colony in 1999 and finished five years later at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2004. Part of the original inspiration came from a series of polaroids made a year or so earlier.