These paintings are oil over collage, a technique that employs the research that went into the subject of the painting, and the hidden influences on our contemporary world. They aim to question misguided values and dangerous trends and have run parallel to my other work for more than thirty years.

Throughout my career, the pastel and colored pencil drawings I use to explore consciousness, reflect on its many levels, and how states of mind are influenced. Exploring the edges  of an emotional state I use clouds to  establish the emotional weather as a boundlessness that we try to pin down. The drawings are philosophical in their intent, questioning the assumption that consciousness is individually localized.

During mt 2013 sabbatical I plunged into ideas of material being through work with clay. Painting in oils on stoneware and porcelain I tried to suggest the place where the non- material becomes physical and when the physical begins to shift into spirit.

Connected to visual ideas in the 3D work, this series uses graphite and duralar stitched together with red thread.
The lower layer is watercolor, the stitching drawing attention to key areas. The illusionistic challenge that propelled me was to get the image to seem to push forward as though a force was growing and swelling behind it. The stitching represents resistance to this growth which creates suffering. Formally, in addition to working against the idea of illusionistic space always opening a window out into space, I also create the illusion of the surface pulling against the stitching.

     The focus in “Behind the Scenes” is the energy that pushes from the other side of the picture. All of my work hopes to represent what’s invisible to conventional senses, to suggest that reality doesn’t end with what we know. I’m fascinated with the mystery of “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” The question of what pushes life into being is why I study the boundary that makes it visible.
      In the drawings prior to this year, creating an impression of something pushing from behind the surface, coupled with our resistance to giving up old layers was the primary focus. By taking these drawings to paint, using oils on panel more tactile illusion is possible.  Using skin as the metaphor for the boundary that gives that energy an appearance of materiality, the psychology of our relationship to that energy is expressed through the condition of the skin, thick to thin in “Angry Kitten”, inflamed and diseased in “Snarling Puppy”. Each includes the presence of the past in the visible layers thinking of time as nested, not linear.
The two new drawings use the additional restraint of the frame using the paper’s surface as the element that seemingly holds back. This helped me work out what was necessary for the relationship with what holds it back. By including the illusion of an actual frame the sense of the painting bulging toward the viewer is increased. The whole series resists both the conventions of painting as a window and figure/ground breakdown. Without a “figure” I am able to evade recognition. I want things to look real without identity. Besides skin, what can be identified, staples and buckles, are obviously not what the picture is about. By using the image of being restrained by something I hope to dramatize primitive emotions held in the flesh and stimulate mirror neurons and their attending physical reactions without familiar features. Snarling Puppy uses disintegrating skin to reflect on the corruption of hman feeling.
 

The new drawings added to Behind the Scenes break down more sophisticated human unkindness. I try to engage the mirror neurons of facial expression without a recognizable face.