Artist Statement

I began painting in the late 1960s, creating large-scale, hard-edge, geometric paintings. I was using brilliant colors and sharply edged forms to challenge the two-dimensional surface with the intention to create ambiguous and undulating spaces. At the time Modernism's lock on art was giving way to a post-modern blurring of boundaries between theoretical practice and experimentation with nontraditional media and form, and through a mining of Pop culture and a wider range of personal expression, including social and political concerns. “Painting is Dead” was the decry of the time (not the first, nor the last time painting was denounced). In this unsettling transitional period I kept painting, ever finding infinitely more ways I could push form, color and space relationships to new limits. Then, in 1980, the landmark Picasso Retrospective at MOMA had a profound effect on me, ultimately influencing a radical shift in my aesthetic focus from pure abstraction to incorporating a personally expressive Pop-figuration, representing human relationships in all its raw emotions. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, during a nomadic period of travel as a visiting artist at Universities and Art Schools throughout the US, my paintings became narrative and more assertive (and larger in scale). This time away from New York enabled me to crystallize my art-making practice while I continued to expand and transition my ideas. When I returned to New York (and the Bronx) in 1999 I also returned to abstraction, incorporating collage and gestural paint handling inspired by the natural parkland that surrounds me in the North Bronx where I currently reside. 

My belief is that by staying open to challenge and change one can achieve great things in art (or any endeavor). This notion was recently reinforced when I visited the Gagosian gallery to see the Picasso “Tête-á-tête” exhibition of selected works from his life’s work, side by side — “how Picasso intended us to encounter his art....in conversation with each other.” An opening quote from Picasso decaled on the entry wall of the gallery struck a chord in my psyche, which made me reflect on the ongoing subconscious influence that Picasso still had on me. 

He said: “I am probably a painter without style…I shift about too much, I move too often. You see me here, and yet I’ve already changed, I’m already elsewhere. I never stay in one place, and that’s why I have no style” — Pablo Picasse, 1963 

Like Picasso, I don’t question stylistic shifts or what is influencing me at any given time, my only concerns are to be in the moment, and that my art is honest, inspired and engaging.