Mission

     I produce artwork because it has been and continues to be something that I was born to do. As with many aspects of art, finding pleasing color combinations is subjective, and varies from person to person. I love color and one of my first goals is to create aesthetically pleasing and bright color harmonies, most often representing happiness and peace of mind. This is the state that I enter into when working, and the emotional state I wish to convey to my viewers. Although they have been rare, a few of my paintings are incongruous. Art is very much about evoking an emotional response. As so well spoken by Pablo Picasso, “colors, like features, follow the changes of emotions.”

     Although color harmonies can be difficult, balanced color combinations have been a welcome challenge.

     When I noticed that some of my former students struggled with color, it became one of my objectives to train my students to see and understand color. Although I am not infallible, the solutions to my own understanding of color problems have been something that I can usually evaluate by looking at the painting, and I have been flexible enough to respect the color combinations of others that I felt were equally harmonious.

     As I continued to develop as an artist, I have been driven in a direction that has led me to experiment with a series of varied styles. I have worked and painted in five distinctive styles including: Mixed Media, Drip Paintings, Shapeism, Minimalism, and Surrealism.

     My most recent work has taken me along a path that has consisted of a variation of mixed media in which I embed small objects on the surface of the canvas. The substrate was always the canvas. Many but not all, were monochromatic. Among the objects that I have utilized were: all types of pasta, beads, glitter, matches, paperclips, pure pigments, q-tips, rice, rubber bands, sand, staples, washers, pebbles, shells and more. The mixed media experience has been one of endless creativity in which the choice of objects and color are the key elements of control. These canvasses consist of two types, those with painted objects and those with objects alone.

     Prior to this, my artwork consisted of two kinds of abstract paintings: Drip Paintings, and Minimalism. All were a form of exuberant freedom when compared to other styles. They were a spontaneous and immediate release of energy, passion, and emotions. They consisted of non-objective shapes whose interpretation relied solely on the imagination of the viewer. This process was guided along with the suggested names for the paintings. Furthermore, I have been striving to achieve a sense of control of both bright color and limited shapes within the confines of a media, that was not readily controllable. I normally do not use stencils. More importantly, as the abstract artist Robert Motherwell wrote: “The need is for felt experience – intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic. If a painting does not make a human contact, it is nothing. Through pictures our passions touch.” I have been looking for an immediate release of energy and emotions.

     Shapeism has many of the qualities of other abstract paintings, but as the name suggests is more about the forms of the shapes in addition to bright colors. Shapeism was my first exploration into the world of spray paint.

     Many of my earlier oil paintings consisted of surrealistic Cityscapes of Saratoga Springs. It was my intention to use drawings on the canvas before applying paint to convey a sense of the intricacies of the buildings in flat space. My surrealistic vision was one of detail with imagined skies. Most of these images were intuitively 2-dimensional. I selected those aspects that were present in the buildings with the greatest clarity, and emphasized them. I worked to attain a form of surrealism and abstraction that relied on color, and contours that elicited mental images. In addition, I attempted to make use of color to indicate patterns of sunlight, moonlight, and astronomical phenomena. All of the Saratoga Springs paintings have had the characteristic yellow dots that have become my signature, indicating the movement of sunlight and the stars at night. A number of the buildings I attempted to portray have had a place in history. It was part of my mission to spark a sense of surprise, when my audience discerned a familiar image rendered in bright colors abstracted from reality. My view of this kind of surrealism meant that ‘the art jumps off the canvas and turns the painting into a moment of recognition.’ This response has motivated me to paint. Finally, my mission as an artist has found inspiration from Robert Whitman’s, (my father’s) work in the field of performance art by bringing his concepts of abstract surrealism, 3-dimensional abstraction, and abstract science to the canvas. Please note, I consider Pablo Picasso and Robert Motherwell to be outstanding role models, and a source of inspiration among other artists far beyond my capabilities.