Artist Statem
I received a BFA in painting from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. I also studied art history with an emphasis on the Italian Renaissance. I moved to San Francisco in 1986 and had my first one person show at Triangle Gallery on Bush Street in 1989. I showed at Triangle for twenty years. It was the longest lived contemporary art gallery in San Francisco. It closed when the director, Jack Van Hiele passed away at 93. After that I had a number of shows at Art Zone in San Francisco and Abmeyer-Wood Fine Art in Seattle. Also various group shows including the De Saisset Museum and the de Young Open.
I moved my studio in the mid- nineties to the Hunters Point Shipyard, an abandoned Naval shipyard surrounded by the bay and decaying buildings. My early paintings were entirely abstract, large Color Field paintings, but I gradually became more interested in the Images of the Urban Landscape that I was photo documenting. In 2005 I made my first representational painting since college. The structure and problem solving of Realism satisfied an existential need that had not been fulfilled by my abstract work.
I am inspired by the quiet beauty of the Venetian Renaissance masters Bellini, Georgione and Titian. I try to emulate them by using many layers of oil paint and transparent glazes which transform the desolate urban landscapes into harmonious compositions of color and light. Hopefully my paintings will also be a historical record of this time and place.