What makes an image live?
What makes it art?
We live in a time or tumult where daily life teems with the unexpected. Many share their own worries about the very foundations upon we build our lives. Is this a moment unlike any other?
I’ve studied art history for many decades, and I notice that such questions haunt every generation and every society of people across decades, centuries, and millennia. Answers rarely show themselves quickly and we rely upon hindsight to make sense of thorny times.
Yet what most often survives civilizations is its art, both high and low. almost artists are outsiders of a sort, eyes and awareness mesmerized by th invisible, compelled to tame empty canvas, blank paper and now, invisible pixels to share visions of what doens’t yet exist. You are invited to tour my studio virtually, and consider the images vying for my hand to make them visible. Welcome!
(The image above is an extreme closeup of detail from the work “A Cosmic Wind,” created with pigment pencil on vellum. The challenge, ever present for me with this media, is that no strokes or ‘mistakes’ can be hidden or erased, so it feels as exacting as watercolor, just without the liquid.)
What makes an image compelling?
Works shown: Red Road, Cathedral in the Sky, Witha’s Dream, Immaculate Conception.
Inner Portraits led me to Cities in Transition and Cafe Conversations.
Is it the subject the artists has selected? The technique? The skill in rendering that achieved after hundreds of hours, days, or years, of practice?
Is it the gesture, the studied “realism,” or a happy accidental flourish, that evokes the movement or stillness of one’s model or theme?
Or is it the sense that something of consciousness has been captured? The focus you imagine in the eyes of a portrait, or the sense of liveliness, affect and attitude, within what you see, shifts in cycles of artistic interpretation.
Works shown: Illustrations in digital media and watercolor.
Studies, Homages, Illuminés, Imaginings, and what’s next.
There are moments of direct inspiration, followed by intense efforts to capture the flash on paper, in gesture, color, texture.
Artists have always learned from each other, and study has always involved honoring and re-interpreting a past master’s art.
The works presented on this site live within that tradition, and take their inspiration for the anima and anime present in the original works of art.
The eyes of a lioness, or those of a multi-faceted woman, while caught in shadow, are brimming with light and life.