I've enjoyed making images as long as I can remember. In the early sixties I studied at the San Francisco Art Institute with Jack Jefferson, Richard Diebenkorn, Gordon Cook, Bruce McGaw, among others. I've maintained a studio and had solo, group and juried shows in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since.
I have been active in many aspects of making and sharing art: helped found a cooperative gallery in Alameda, Calif.; worked seven months on Judy Chicago's Dinner Party with colleagues from all over the U.S. and abroad; curated shows; worked through art to raise the consciousness of a community about the conversion of a military installation to peaceful use; taught drawing and painting in my studio.
Recently I have been making, showing and teaching art in southern India and will continue to do so. I find the environment expanding with many opportunities to explore visual space in different ways, in different mediums.
A feeling of floating, fear of falling, freedom from enmeshment, and the possibility of encompassing the whole brings me back again and again to working with the space that one experiences through looking at aerial views of the earth. The work that comes from this experience I call the Gaia Series (Gaia, the earth as a self-regulating organism).
I stretch canvasses or staple paper to a panel on the studio wall. It hangs from a bolt through its center which is screwed to a stud. This arrangement enables me to rotate the panel at will. I can blow, spatter, spread, throw, sponge, and guide with the help of gravity, the paint over the surface. These actions create patterns, a small reflection of the way the surface of the earth is sculpted by wind water and fire by spinning in space. Interacting with the paint in this way creates for me ever-surprising images to work with.
What does it mean to our visual perception to be conscious of ourselves whirling through space where the polarities of horizontal and vertical dissolve into a new sense of dimensionality? Above and below are no longer directions, but densities.
For years I have explored this space experienced by looking at aerial views of our earth. My artistic process includes drawing and photographing aerial scenes while flying in hot-air balloons, and small and large airplanes.
When I work on landscapes out of doors, light is the element that draws me and unifies my images. Time of day and weather are what I want to capture. Texture, space and pattern follow in importance. I usually do a drawing first on the site, then turn it into a watercolor or pastel on returning to my studio.
I do drawings for paintings, drawings to work out compositions, points of view, to explore space. I draw to delight in texture, to see space open and close, to remember a face. I draw to release me from the ground and to ground myself.
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Gaia Series II/Flux (Diptych)
Acrylic on canvas, 36x48
Gaia Turning Series/Sunrise
Acrylic on canvas, 7’x8’
Gaia Series II/Enead
Acrylic on canvas, 90x66
Auro ’06 #6
Chalk pastel on paper, 15x18.5
Auro ’06 #4
Chalk pastel on paper, 18.5x15