Paintings:

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My earliest passion was designing, building, and flying ultra-light indoor model airplanes. Their propellers turned very slowly — less than one revolution per second, propelling them at the speed of a slow walk. They climbed in graceful circles to the 200-foot-high ceilings of the dirigible hangars in Lakehurst, NJ. 

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During the half hour or more that my airplanes flew, I watched, transported into what I felt was a magical world. It was silent but full of echoes. That world was vast, but I still could see walls and ceilings – just that they were so far off. The restraints of gravity and time seemed greatly lessened – though they were still there. As I write this, I can still feel that world. The experience left its mark.This pursuit engendered a love of intricate and delicate machines, of flight, and of interior architectural spaces. 

 

Now I make paintings, and I want my viewers to experience the wonder of that that magical world. 

 

What one notices first about my paintings is that they are objects, shaped but entirely flat wood panels. They exist, like sculpture, in the world of the viewers. The viewers are meant to sense of the transition through the painted surface physically, to feel as if their hand and then their whole existence could pass through the painting into a world on the other side.

 

There, the viewers find themselves alone in a world of Renaissance architecture. They can wander through the corridors and grand halls, but they often find that the spaces don’t work out as expected. They find dead ends or come to emptiness where they feel that they might indeed fall off this world’s edge. The only thing they find that seems concrete is a mechanical device of unknown purpose.    

 

Are these paintings invitations to the viewer to propel the machine and these images into motion? to bring them to life? Are they meant to do this through their “touch”, that is, their sight and thought alone? I believe so.