Floodscapes


Reflected City 24 x24 oil 08 

About these paintings:

A square with a triangle atop it is one of the first visual symbols a child draws. These naively rendered houses represent our memory of and longing for home. As the series evolved, these symbols of home became more elongated, abstract, and totemic while "the Flood" itself evolved into a metaphor for displacement. My challenge has been to translate this sense of loss and disembodiment into the language of paint-- texture, composition, and color.

I have given each painting a “history” through a long distressing process: scrubbing, scraping, and wiping away to reveal shadows, faded colors, and echoes or ghosts of underlying imagery. This creates surfaces in which most of the information is buried below layers of paint, visually communicating the concept of impermanence, time passing, erosion.

I use composition deliberately to reinforce a sense of our smallness against the "bigness of nature" by placing most of the information in the bottom of the canvas, dwarfed by the sky. Multiple horizon lines shift the imagery into the center of the picture plain, as if floating, with houses reflected in the sky; a composition designed to dislocate the viewer from his normal frame of reference.

The emotional use of Color plays an important part in creating mood. I use a palette of somber violets, green-grays and translucent layers of milky color to convey the quality of light after a storm, the thick saturated air that I recall growing up along the Connecticut shore.
Disembodied 30 x 30


remains of new orleans 30 x 30 oil 08
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