24x36  Acrylic on Canvas

I am often drawn to paintings of water fowl. When in flight I sense a tranquility and transcendence.  I aimed to capture the peaceful beauty of their migration.

24x36 ... Acrylic on Canvas

This painting is an interpretation of “A Park at Night” by Józef Ripple-Rónai (Hungarian: 1861-1927).  Innocence refers to the historical moment when he painted it, the end of the 19th century. A time when night would pass, the lamps would stay lit, and the trees would still stand tomorrow. But that endurance seems to have been lost to us. For us change is swift, and so much of the past is forgotten. The park might still be there, but the tranquil silence is gone.

24x24 Acrylic on Canvas

A quasi-historical theme. “Quasi” in that it’s based on a maritime myth from the 19th century. A ghost ship that never makes port, doomed to sail the oceans forever, never making port, never finding rest. Since completing it, I’ve been told that this ship is also featured in a Disney movie. That’s fine, but this isn’t fantasy, it’s a memory. The weight of a curse that never ends.

16x20 Acrylic on Canvas

Painted during the depths of the Time of the Virus. a Time that was supposed to last only a few weeks, or until the weather turned warmer, or until some other goal had been achieved. The figure isn’t watching the sunset, he is waiting for it to end. J.M.W. Turner inspired the sky, because no one else captures light as he did. Not calm. Not gentle. Raging. I painted this not to capture a moment, but to grasp it.

16x20 Acrylic on Canvas

This painting nearly takes me back to my first paintings, which were almost exclusively of vortices and spheres. Another notional painting, and like the others I’ve thus far displayed, I hold a strong reluctance to explicate it. Some moments aren’t meant to be named. They’re meant to be experienced. 

16x20 Acrylic on Canvas

My intent with this painting was to meld notional with landscape. This has been my ambition throughout most of the year as I have focused on notional paintings, many of which are pure abstracts. I am inspired in this direction by the contemporary painter Peter Doig. But I am most influenced by the greatest (my opinion) English painter JMW Turner. This work was actually difficult to execute. And though it began as an experiment of sorts, as it came together I discovered it expressed a deep personal feeling as well. And so I dedicate this one to Garrin Erikson, our beloved niece who departed from us nearly a year before this was painted.

36x24 Acrylic on Canvas

A subjective painting. Inspired by a walk along Havre de Grace's Promenade on a foggy day. I hope there is some notional aspect to this work. Painting a fog shrouded scene severely mutes the colors, introducing a hint of mystery to this picture. A mystery that the viewer is invited to resolve.

24x36 Acrylic on Canvas

This painting began as an exercise in texture and ambience. Mount Fuji rising from the mist, a quiet weight. A torii gate, suggesting still water hidden in the mist. And the crane, clearly painted in black and white, a stark contrast with the rest of the composition. A silent dialogue between a being and its environment.

30x40 Acrylic on Canvas

This painting blends notional and subjective. Its elements are clear, its composition stripped bare, not to simplify, but to capture the essence of a man’s struggle against nature. This is not the moment when a man screams, he endures.

48x24 Acrylics on canvas

Commissioned as a large vertical work (this is 48”x24”) with a high horizon. What emerged is not an island, but a presence. The trees don’t stand, they dissolve. Their reflection isn’t secondary, it’s the core of the painting. Ice chunks flow pass, breaking its rhythm, hiding parts of it. This isn’t a landscape, it’s a struggle. The reflection is truth, even when it’s broken.

24x48 Acrylic on Canvas

I had painted works on this scale before, but ceased because they took so long to complete. This was the first of a new generation of larger paintings for me. Taking less time as I had recently adopted a layering technique of applying smaller dots on top of larger ones, allowing me to fill the entire canvas in less time. This technique has other bonuses as well, one of which is to make my work textured. 

The inspiration for this piece was the film “Bladerunner”. Cyclists navigating through people, vehicles and stationary obstacles. The rain slicked streets, the neon glow. But I chose an opposing notion. One where the world is quiet and still, where people can be at peace by simply riding their bikes through a park in a gentle rain.

12x16  Acrylic on Canvas

Inspired by a friend's motto. A retired sailor who never went to sea. He was an airman whose aircraft were too large to land on a carrier. But his life was an endless journey, both physically and spiritually. As oxymoronic a person as I have ever known.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas

A portrait of my wife and her father on the streets of Little Italy, Manhattan. The city moves around them. It’s an environment where my wife feels most at home.

16x20. ... Acrylic on Canvas

A quiet rural scene at dusk, where cows graze freely in a field where they don’t belong—thanks to a busted fence. No one’s coming to fix it. Maybe no one should

20x16 Acrylic on Canvas

Little Italy in Manhattan, once covering more than a few blocks, has been encroached upon from all sides. Yet what remains still holds the ambience of a unique culture with an old world charm.

20x16 ... Acrylic on Canvas

Washington Square in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, draws a slew of chess players on any warm sunny day. The chess boards are permanent on cement tables. It’s not uncommon to see several people waiting for their term to play.

12x16 ... Acrylic on Canvas

For Lunar New Year, the streets of Manhattan's Chinatown are closed to cars and filled with people. Some are part of dragon and lion troops with pounding drums, some are there to watch the spectacle, and others are just passing through. I painted this with a distinct yellowish hue to mimic the effect of an old color photo, specifically one where the cyan has faded, shifting the entire image toward a warmer, more nostalgic tone.

14x9 Acrylic on Canvas

I wanted to lean into the pointillist technique which I use with all of my paintings. Those tiny dots aren’t just a style; they’re the dust, the heat haze, the slow erosion of time. 

36x48 Acrylic on Canvas

Painted as a gift for my mother, but also as a challenge to create a painting in three parts, each of which can stand alone. I embraced a Japanese aesthetic — not in mimicry, but in spirit — letting simplicity carve space for silence, stillness.

11x14 Acrylic on Canvas

I am often attracted to painting birds. They live between worlds — earth and sky, motion and stillness, noise and silence

36x48  Acrylic on Canvas

I began this painting before moving to Collinsville, CT, and completed it there. It concluded my series of East Africa themed paintings. The animals pictured here were all from photographs taken on games drives in Tanzania. This was also the first painting that I gave to a woman who I was courting. As a gift, it suggests how confident I was, for I still think of it as one of my best. The painting now graces my studio. And the woman I was courting married me a couple years later.

15x30 ... Acrylic on Canvas

Collinsville is the name of a small community on the Farmington River in Connecticut. Named after a now defunct ax factory, at the time I moved there it was hidden artist colony. The area still holds a great deal of charm, although many of the artists moved on once gentrification took hold.

12x16  Acrylic on Canvas

Chinese New Year in Chinatown, Manhattan. I wanted to capture the vibrancy of the atmosphere, the noise, the motion, the exuberance. I aimed to paint the feeling of being there. There are performers and observers, but everyone there is the parade.

11x14  Acrylic on Canvas

On the right is a small craft gallery, ablaze in light and life. One the left is the Town Hall, dark and empty. The Yin and Yang of Collinsville, CT. One pulses with creation, the other holds the memory of order.

16x20 Acrylic on canvas

New England was the birthplace of the Congregational Church. Their familiar structures stand like custodians of memory. On a warm autumnal day, they breathe a nostalgic sense of peace.

15x30  Acrylic on Canvas

I cannot say where the notion for this painting came from. I can only say that I pondered it for several years before I applied my first dot. It began as a whisper: what if the county fair wasn’t for people, but for animals?

So I painted it:

• A massive pig with no collar, led with effortless dignity by a man in a white shirt and tie.
• An ox guided by child barely taller than its knees
• An old woman and a hunchback, side by side, guiding a regal llama
• A golden goose, curiously large, gravely waddling like a monarch
• A snow white lamb leading a procession of monks
• And on the opposite shore of a creek, two boys. One absorbed with pulling in a fish, while the other sits at the base of tree, pouting, waiting for his turn … if he gets one.

This is a world where the absurd is the only logic. A dream where the rules are broken and no one notices.

11x14 Acrylic on Cancas

This old, broken wagon is from a bygone day, left to decay in a field with a solitary tree there to watch over it. Crows flying over the horizon, guides to another world.

10x20 Acrylic on Canvas

I cannot say where the notion for this painting came from. I can only say that I pondered it for several years before I applied my first dot. It began as a whisper: what if the county fair wasn’t for people, but for animals?

16x12 Acrylic on Canvas

A day in the depth of winter can be reflective and reinvigorating. Not all solitude is lonely.

11x14 Acrylic on Canvas

I painted this in 2007. It was quite different from the other paintings of that period with its larger dots and looser style, as compared with the tighter, more controlled method of contemporaneous works. It has more in common with my current style, I’m not trying to control the dots, but rather letting them tell the story. This painting wasn’t ahead of its time. It was ahead of me.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 At one point I hired a local fisherman to take me out in his boat to photograph the shoreline where I lived. The Burhani Mosque on the left is a noticeable landmark. The building on the right with the green roof is where I lived. What looks like a doorway to open space is actually a window that, when open, gave me a phenomenal view of Old Port and the Indian Ocean. And it also provided an often appreciated ocean breeze.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 A simple translation of Nida Kuu could be “Main Street”. It was the only street in Mombasa’s Old Town that effectively ran in a straight line, all others composed a maze which I often used to guide upcountry compatriots to my flat. (I did this to make it difficult for them to find their way back on their own.) The little alleyway on which I lived was directly off this street. In the distance, at the beginning of this road, you can see Fort Jesus, a fort built by the Portuguese a few years after Columbus’s first voyage. It was built as a fort, but acted more as a prison for those poor souls who were stationed there.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 Mandrey Mosque is the oldest mosque in Mombasa. Nights come early and quickly in Mombasa. Most folks shutter up not long after darkness comes. But it was not uncommon for me to wander the labyrinthine pathways of Kibokoni (Old Town) late in the evening, where I would occasionally pass an Mzee (old man … a term of respect and endearment) doing the same. The quiet was seductive. And because I lived in the community, and everyone there knew it, it was always safe.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 This is my first painting after moving to Kibokoni (aka Old Town) in Mombasa. In this painting, the white building with red trim was my home. My studio apartment can be identified by what appears to be a doorway that opens on to empty air. In was truly a place of inspiration.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 Sometimes fellow Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) asked to stay at my flat during a trip to Mombasa. I was kinda required to accommodate them. I would generally meet them at Fort Jesus to guide them to my home. If you recall the blurb from Ndia Kuu, then you know that getting to my place was pretty much a straight line. But the shortest distance between two points is boring, so I rarely took that path. I lead my guest(s) through a maze of streets and alleyways, sometimes walking in complete circles. Invariably we would pass this mosque. If my guest recognized it the second time around then I knew (s)he was paying attention.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 Built by the Portuguese in 1593-1596, more of a prison to those assigned there. It guards the entrance to the Old Port. The New Port is on the other side of the Mombasa island, and it can modern handle ships that make the boats in Old Port look like quaint toy models.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 In the autumn of ’92 I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Kenya to teach Pascal programming at Mombasa Polytechnic Institute (now named Technical University of Mombasa). The first year there is my longest period of not painting since I first applied acrylic to canvas. My friend, Leila, rectified this situation by sending me some paints, a few brushes and a dozen canvas boards. I feel that the paintings I did in East Africa marked a new level for me. This painting, titled for the Swahili word for dhow (which I suppose is an Arabic word for boat) introduces a series of paintings completed (1993-1994) from my small apartment overlooking Mombasa’s Old Port and the Indian Ocean.

16x20 Acrylic on Canvas

 A few months before my Peace Corps contract was complete, I ran out of the canvas boards that Leila had sent me. So I told my friends there that if they gave me a canvas then I would return it after I covered it with dots. This was one my favorites. An imaginary scene intended to capture a few elements from the couple years I spent in East Africa. The center piece is a Baobob tree, these monster trees are common upcountry (away from the coast) and never fail to impress. The coffee drinkers are the Swahili element, all being observed by an upcountry Samburu warrior in the background.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 And here I am in my flat overlooking the Old Port of Mombasa. The cat came with the place.

12x16 Acrylic on Canvas Board

 This was the view from my flat, the old port of Mombasa. Ancient looking dhows still traveled to and from here, trading in figs, spices, salted fish, among other things. In the distance is the Indian Ocean. I never tired of this view. At night, I fell asleep to the sounds of waves lapping at the base of my building.