These are large charcoal drawings; large in scale, if not always so in dimensions.  Most are roughly life-size. Many incorporate tarpaper, newsprint, canvas or other media/materials. Some are made directly from a model, some based on a photograph or multiple photographs.

The paintings are oil and charcoal and collage on canvas or masonite. The subjects are displaced persons, time travelers, ghosts: most of them from the 30?s and 40?s, people sidelined on farms or city streets, as represented in Farm Security Administration photographs. Apart from me, outside the flow of daily life, strong and bleak and solitary, they wake me with the rawness of their lives. The process is excavation: trying shapes and colors and removing them again, digging for bone with paint and charcoal until, as my eyes become accustomed to a different light, I begin to recognize the depths and artifacts of a certain room, a landscape, the structure of a morning, the sharp solitude of twilight; to see the colors and shadows of a world I cannot enter.

(In much the same spirit I peer sideways into lighted windows as I pass at night.)

My first solo show consisted of men and women, sitting or standing alone, without a narrative. I called it “Waiting for Godeau” and accompanied it with this statement, which can be applied to these more recent women as well:

There's an acting exercise in which each actor, in however small a role, reinterprets the play in the light of his or her own character and takes the lead. These may be minor characters in minor dramas, but here they are the stars.

They are presented outside of time and context, while they were waiting for something else: for a bus, or a lover, or for the day to pass, or for news. For the time when they will light another cigarette. Something has happened here, or something is about to happen, but now they only sit and wait.

(Robert Godeau was a funeral director in San Francisco when I was in school there. I used to pass his sign every day on the bus. I’ve waited 30 years to make this pun.)

For the past ten years or so, my primary focus has been the theater.  The first seven items here are brief dramatic or comedic monologues.  They are followed by a 12-minute scene I directed on Zoom, my interpretation of a Shakespearean sonnet, and a silent animated charcoal drawing, which is without a category of its own so I have smuggled it into this project.  Also related to theater are my “Written Word” project, which includes adaptations I’ve made for the stage from other literary works, and my "Installations" project, with environments closely approaching stage design.

These prints are solar etchings made from photos of my large charcoal drawings. Some are combined with monotypes, others include hand coloring and/or collage. Many of the original drawings can be seen in the project "black and white".

Solar etching is a process of etching a plate by placing on it a positive image on acetate (directly inked on the acetate or reproduced from a photo), and exposing it to light. With normal exposure, you get a plate with which you can print a precise image of the original. But if you remove the acetate, which was masking the dark areas, and expose the whole plate to a few seconds of light, the darker areas will in effect "fall off", leaving unexpected areas of textured white. I greatly enjoy these times when I no longer completely control a project, and fate takes a hand.

Thank you to Soledad Salome for instructing me in this process and for the use of her studio, to Janet Maher of Loyola and to School 33. (I get by with a little help from my friends.)

These are small assemblages which combine charcoal or wire drawings of bluesmen and farmers with found objects and materials such as wood, plaster, wire, wax, and paint. Some of them verge on the sculptural; I think of them as 2-1/2 dimensional.  I find a joyous physicality in playing with the rough materials, and hope these pieces express that pleasure.

Many of these pieces were made simply for the sensual pleasure of working with soft charcoal, thick paint and vibrant color, and a fascination with line, which I approached as if I were following it, as it moved across a page. Many of the pieces in this project, even those not obviously linear, express that fascination. Three of them were part of a larger project, which can be seen here in my projects “moving pictures” and “installations”.

I worked for many years in the theater, primarily as a set designer. It was tremendously exciting to create a piece of art which one could walk into, immerse onesself in an environment, imagine oneself in some different time and place. I still prefer to incorporate my paintings and drawings as elements of an environment, rather than to hang them individually on clean white walls. The installation "where the Southern cross the Dog" (the capitalization is deliberate; it's a line from an old blues song W.C. Handy overheard while waiting for a train) incorporated various materials and detritus which would have been part of the lives of the farmers and Delta bluesmen in my paintings.  An old radio in the corner played country blues. The installation "timeline" explored expressions of time and line both in the drawings I made (mummies, trees, figures from long ago) and in the materials—wire, rope, rebar—which filled the room and passed through the air from drawing to drawing. Other of these installations were more purely abstract; one, "From Reverence to Exultation", was an actual set design for a jazz performance.

Sometimes a visual image doesn't seem sufficient, and I approach the work again through text or, in one case, an animated video (which can be seen in the project "moving pictures". The two expressions can stand independently, but taken together they serve to enrich one another. At other times an essay may help pull together an installation or exhibition of paintings, providing insight to the viewer or, perhaps more significantly, to myself.  

Other of these pieces are adaptations for the stage of a variety of works, ranging from the ancient Greek Trojan Women to Jack and the Beanstalk.

I spent two weeks in Italy a few years ago. I missed connections and spent the first night in Toronto; my bag traveled on its own to London and Albania and reluctantly rejoined me in Siena 9 days later; I fell through a trapdoor in a shop in Rome & hurt my knee rather seriously; I had a terrific cold and stomach flu and the weather was, as we say, brutto. It was brilliant. Italy may be the most beautiful place I've ever been. I walked through so many beautiful medieval cities I became blase', thought I was beyond being surprised or impressed, and then I'd turn a corner and stop dead, mouth open, no words available save, you should pardon the expression, "holy shit". When I became thoroughly lost I'd ask directions in my rudimentary Italian and people would walk blocks out of their way, closing up shop if necessary, to take me where I wanted to go, or where they thought it sounded like I wanted to go. I took about a thousand photographs.