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Peak
Performance
Oil on Wood (28" X 26")
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This
painting suggests a mountain which is seemingly covered in structures
resembling buildings, counter-pointed with another more distant
and vaporous mountainous landscape behind it. The effect is to
suggest an epic structure encapsulated by a grand landscape.
Man's creative potential is juxtaposed with the vastness of nature. |
Octagon
Oil on Wood (41" across)
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The
artist found this frame in a trash heap — it was originally
for a poker table. It presented something of a compositional
challenge, with the dynamism of a tondo and the faceted corners
of horizontal painting. The design is a series of warm facets
around a more coolly colored center, and it vaguely suggests
the qualities of an oasis in the desert. |
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Arcadia
Revisited
Oil on Wood (48" X 32")
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Arcadia
is defined as a place of beauty and tranquility. An idealistic
bucolic paradise often used as a subject by artists and writers
of the past. The band of rippling blue suggests coolness and
a quality of refreshment against the warmer colors of the flat
area before it. Plant like forms on the horizon suggest a quality
akin to the hanging gardens of Babylon. This is a painting which
contrasts aridness with fecundity, the hot and dry with the cool
and lush. |
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Tondo
VI
Oil on Wood (28" diameter)
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This
is the last in a series of round paintings -- in them forms are
interlocked with attention to the flow of color and free-formed "bridge
passages" to connect them. The painting is meant to flow
like a piece of music, with statements of shapes as themes, then
developed sections in which these themes-shapes vary, and then
recapitulate to take the form of echoes of the original shapes.
Note for instance the red bars at the bottom of the composition
echoed with variation by the greenish blue bars on the left.
This is a painting of variations, counterpoint, and development:
hard outlines alternating with soft organic forms. The whole
work is a kind of visual music. |
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Vinland
Oil on Wood (36" X 27")
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The
heavy impasto treatment and color is suggestive of wine country.
It is said that the harsh conditions of some vineyards contribute
to the quality of the wine, as the roots have to dig deeper and
are thus more stable and productive and less subject to the vagaries
of bad weather. The painting suggests rolling hills but also
the shapes of grapevines struggling skyward. There is even a
vague suggestion of a vinery towards the center of the painting. |