About my work
I became interested in painting heads of poets and writers about 20 years ago. I read their work and I paint their portrait; it is an on-going practice—one writer leading to another.
We have an idea of what these individuals look like from photographs, but in painting them I have an opportunity for close study and interpretation. I use several source images to construct the paintings, and purposefully distance myself from each one by doing drawings, and then drawings of my drawings before I settle on a composition. I want to get an approximate likeness, but what I’m most interested in is an expression (especially in the eyes) of bemused disappointment or a matter-of-fact directness.
The newer paintings are small, no bigger than an 8 inches square; and they require a different touch. Over the last several years, I’ve also been working on groups of figures. These configurations complicate our ability to read which limb belongs to which body, or whose head is whose. This visual confusion reflects the struggle of the painting process itself, which is fundamentally an effort to locate elements within a two-dimensional space. And, in a sense, the rough-housing depicted, also mimics life. Though these kids are just having fun wrestling with each other, it is still about power and who has the upper hand. They hover between glee and rage, success and loss.
So much poetry, music, and art in our variable natural world, and so little time. I celebrate artists of all kinds and I try to look without blinking at the passage of time, at death, at memory and forgetting, at sorrow, humour, loss, love, and the big world. I’m following my nose.