King of Dorney Park Estates, Left panel of a diptych, Oil on canvas, 30" x 40", 2015, Private collection
Landscapes
Landscapes, real, remembered or imagined, continue to be an essential part of my imagery. Memories of the Mississippi River and Missouri farms, the fields of corn and soy beans I drive through on my way to and from Kutztown, or the view out the third floor window on a snowy day in Reading generate the basic images which only take solid form through the act of painting.
Figures and faces
The human form (and the odd cat or cow) is always an interesting challenge. Self-portraits are rightly of little interest to anyone else, but the model is cheap. People that live inside my head, is a series exploring my own particular collection of imagined persons who apparently wish to escape my head into the world of representation.
Prints and books
Making a work of art that exists as multiple instances is an interesting proposition. I first wrote "multiple copies" but that is not quite correct as prints and books are not copies of some singular original but are each the equal of the other. I made some cheap offset-printed books and prints in the'70s and '80s, but the advent of the World Wide Web and the ubiquity of digital printers and print on demand have made that genre less interesting for me.
Chess and games
Like many at the time, I got hooked on chess when Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassy for the world championship in 1972. Though my board play never really developed beyond a patzer, the logic and the imagery have stayed with me. In progress are a series of 64 chess boards depicting real and imagined games which together will form a large chess board.
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Conceptual art
The term "conceptual art" is vague at best, but it is widely used and I can think of no better term for some of the work I do.
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Older work
Here is a some earlier work, before 1993, the year I moved from the midwest to the east coast. Included here are some images of Crumbs, the school newspaper of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I attended graduate school in the late 1970s and a few things from my undergraduate days at Washington University in St. Louis.
