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.

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. 

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

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

This project explored layers of superimposed etched drawings with a third layer of shaped colored paper. I chose unrelated subjects, horses from a how-to-draw-horses book and soccer players from family photos, and, in one case, a pinwheel-like lily. Only one plate was used in the first group of prints. Where the lines intersected and where the edges of the chine collé paper crossed the lines was intended to energize the images and pack the space in a dynamic way.

The next stage of the project required making a second plate for each image with an aquatint  shape similar to each of the chine collé shapes, inking up these shapes with colors similar to the chine collé papers and printing them over the corresponding line images --just to see if this way I could also produce a floating layered effect and keep the edges clean. However, the edges ended up fuzzier, partly on account of the lingering plate tone and partly on acount of the grainy aquatint, and the shapes look more embedded, almost as if they are in the same plane as the drawn image. Not using plates
that were exactly the same size was another distraction from a clean effect.   However, not resorting to collage made me feel this second batch of prints was somehow more authentic and more permanent.

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 many of the Nova Scotia paintings I did this summer, I continued to work with a piece of cardbord to make the most of the rougher texture on the linen panels. I enjoyed the way the fabric's tooth broke up the painted surface, and I ended up letting this effect be as interesting as any representational detail that was needed to suggest an image. My paintings on regular stretched canvas look quite different.

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. 

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