While most of my subject portraits are of persons no longer alive, their lives, their being, has cast luminous shadows much like starkly placed lights on a deeply darkened road, telling us a way to precede. To suggest that we need such people among us today is not to ignore the fact that many such people are amidst us. The portraits therefore celebrate and memorialize their lives.
The likeness that I have attempted to achieve in these works is a likeness that reflects the interior life of the subject, the ways in which life has formed and deformed them. These are works of the imagination, at once illusive and fixed by the juxtaposition of the materials chosen for the paintings. I have selected wood to make tangible the line- the form- the skeletal foundation of the painting. Paint, constitutes the location at which the interior and exterior worlds of the subject conjoin.
These are paintings of human beings, some of the people depicted had gained fame during their lives, some lived unnoticed, but all had shown brightly in the reality of their living.
After I have completed the drawing on the canvas, which is the foundation of the painting that follows it. I laminate hard wood over the drawing lines. I then think of the wood lines as the skeleton or armature of the painting. In addition to providing me with an unalterable element to which I refer during the painting process, the laminated wood adds a level of third dimensionality that enhances the finish work.
