March is a big month for geese where I live, and these monotypes were what I worked on during the first six weeks of Covid-19 Quarantine. They started out with a foundation of intaglio but soon they were being made just of cutout shapes of geese, multiple overlapping stencils, and layers of colors applied in varying ways and arranged in a vertical, scroll-like format. 

This is an ongoing  series of monotypes inspired by sacred tantric paintings made by "tantrikas",  painters in Rajasthan, India, and collected in a book called "Tantric Song ". Thinking about them, meditating on the reproduced original, and making them--one segueing naturally into yet another--has been an oddly joyful experience in this strange time of separation and turmoil.

This is a selection from three series of monotypes I did during the first summer of the Covid quarantine. The geese belong to the first group and were made with masking and cut-out shapes that could be re-used throughout the series. The images of the other two series are abstract. They were inspired by a collection of small, ancient Tantric paintings created for meditation practice. In these, I was fascinated by the stains and marks (as well as tears), that read like natural palimpsests suggesting age and previous incarnations

These are assorted Maryland landscapes from this summer and last, along with several summery still lifes.

I wanted to paint these landscapes in a different way, not so much with a brush, but with scraps of card board, rags and palette knives. I liked being able to wipe thick colors over the surface and scrape or scratch it to suggest details like trunks and foliage and sticking-up blades of grass. 

In the late summer, I paint along the southwest coast of Nova Scotia. The air can be cool and vaporous when rain or fog are on the way, while at other times, above and below  you see the bluest of blues. 

It was not possible to go to Nova Scotia this year. These are paintings of marshes, waterways, and harbors from other recent years.