Artist Statement

Artist Statement: July 29,2024

When I put my website online I wrote in my artist statement that the use of the narrative, real with text or implied with images is central to my work. For me a work has to tell a story or be about something. I could never embrace decoration or formalism as the final destination in art.
As I reached my seventies I reconsidered my approach towards art. I thought about the impressionist artists growing older with tremors in their hands and cataracts in their eyes which I also had and how it would affect making art.
I also thought about modernism which had dropped narration and subjects in art to make the art itself as the subject. Letting the viewer make their own decision as to the meaning of the art.
I started painting using dots and the surrealist technique of autonomism which produced non- objective free form shapes. I began with 8”x10”Canvases up to 30”x40”. I now have over 20 pieces which do not fit into my previous statements about my art. I haven’t given up anything. I have just broadened my output.


In the 1990’s I did a series of map paintings that were based on the idea that there is a history, which is known, but not talked about. I envisioned the maps as being like cheesy map postcards that are found in truck stops but the events pictured in my maps would be the reality that the chamber of commerce would want to keep hidden like: lynching, toxic waste sites, cancer alley and religious fanaticism. These were large maps , some with a ledge jutting out with a handmade ship of an appropriate nature. In the course of doing these works I began to incorporate collage and print medium straying away from the use of pure painting mediums. I used these techniques when working on my Katrina homage “Welcome to the Gulf”. So I evolved from strictly painting to incorporating mixed mediums and three dimensional forms in the art process.