SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

layering of dissonant imagery of the earlier work, I engaged with paring the imagery to its’ most
essential forms and colors.
The Italian and more local landscapes continue to be a vital part of my studio work. It has also
proven to be the training ground for the subjective imagery of the mixed media collages; these
collages exist in the context of landscape space and are informed by the discoveries I have
made there.
Memory and “subtext” are coordinating elements in both the landscape and the collages. When
involved with the landscape, I am an explorer investigating potential picture ideas. As I work on
a particular motif, I come to live in the space through the painting. I am most often drawn to
hillsides, barns, farmlands, roadways, and water; I search out locations where man’s hand is
evident, yet are solitary, meditative. I’ll return to a particular site at different times of day, hike
to different eye levels and vantage points. Once there, I’ll take photographs and sketch with
watercolor, pen or pencil. Once back in the studio, preliminary studies and photos provide
much of the necessary “mechanical” information such as the specifics of the terrain, the spatial
relationships that exist between one area and another. Sketches and photographs help me to
analyze and simplify the various parts that make up to the composition. Once work is
progressing in the studio, memory and invention, along with subtext, return to play the
dominant role in orchestrating color, stroke, shape, air and temperature—in creating the
physical sensation of being in a specific time and space.
When working on the collages or the landscapes, I often think of the book, Painting: Some
Basic Principles, by Frederick Gore. It is a brilliant little book that I have returned to often
through the years and read to my students. Gore wrote, “The forms in painting cannot be
copied from nature, but must be equivalents to nature, plastic signs and images built up from
simple formal ingredients which both separately and together have intrinsic meaning—that is
the meaning of red or black, curve or straight, smooth or tough, of swift movement or slow,
dark or light—and which, while they indicate events, are also composed musically.” Whether
building the composition from paint alone or using collage elements as shape, texture and color
along with paint, it is the “musical” or “poetic” orchestration of a composition that, in its
arrangement, creates an experience far different than an acknowledgement of its’ discreet parts.
Gore writes, “But whatever we paint, we are committed to an abstract activity. It is then the
total of interacting lines and shape and colors, of planes and rhythms, of plain and patterned
areas, of mass and weight and movement, of space and solid, which make manifest at one and
same time the visible drama and the thoughts and emotions which lie behind—the overriding
idea which gives coherence.” In the collages, captured memories provide the shapes, colors as
well as key figural elements in my quest to honor memory. These elements come from family
and tourist photographs or are appropriated memories from friends; there are also old passports
and caches of material (letters, documents, photos) of people who have lived in our house,
photographs and memorabilia bought at antique shops, art invitations, newspapers, magazines,
images printed off the web or DVD’s. These materials are contrasted with and activated by
paint—so different in its nature—from a photograph or receipt or cut shape.
As I coordinate the collage elements on a canvas or board, I work intuitively. Some images are
used whole, others in part as some material provides shape or color or rhythm. Often, a number
of collages are assembling at the same time in a rather unpredictable way until I believe the
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