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Category: Paintings
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Crossroads
Crossroads, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, 2024
Currently available in Hallowell at 3 page St at the artist’s studio gallery.
This painting was inspired by the flash of my headlights on a back road in Maine as I was coming home late at night. I saw a couple at the side of the road for a split second going by.
This lingered in my head for years and evolved into this painting. This small family that I zipped passed is at a crossroads in their life, a big change. They seem together but perhaps are going to be separated for reasons that life has given them. For them this is a very important moment they will always remember, for me it was an unimportant second on a highway. This is how our lives go by each other. Our important moments are incidental to others.
I wanted to show what I saw, the flashing instant but flesh it out with the story from their side. They of course, didn’t notice me at all…I was incidental to them.
I set them physically at a crossing of two roads and called the painting Crossroads to show their lives are at a turning point.
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Villa Paradiso
Oil on canvas, 30 x 37 inches
I feel I am a realistic painter, in that I want to paint things that are real. Things seen and felt. But to be a realist does not mean to me that every detail has to be rendered in a traditional realistic “one scene” per frame way. Different things in a painting and a painting’s narrative need to be told in different ways.
Here I painted the nude with light spilling on her from her window…but I gave the light physicality with the paint and though I have the blinds from the window I hung them without the wall because the summer feeling of the moment is that your are in the actual sky with the sun dancing down on your skin.
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Inside a dance
Inside a Dance was accepted for the Painting the Figure Now 2021 exhibition at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art in Wausau, WI.
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Stories from the Mezzanine
Commission for Lithgow Library
This is a new painting commissioned by the Friends of Lithgow Library to commemorate the new library.
Stories from the Mezzanine
The Friends of Lithgow Library asked me to create a painting commemorating and celebrating the old and new Lithgow Library. Since many of my public commissions, such as the murals Kennebec in the Capital Judicial Center and City of Ships in Bath, fold together time periods, this was right up my artistic alley.Painting the beautiful architecture, stone, stained glass and lovely wood was a must. This gave the lush stage set for the characters of Stories from the Mezzanine.
The founder of the library from the 1890’s, Llewellyn Lithgow was the first to come to life in the painting. He was a contemporary of Henry Longfellow so I thought it might be interesting if they were having a chat. The library’s current director Betsy Pohl, joined their conversation as the painting’s composition developed. I like this joining of times, our current days with the library days of the 1890’s, bookends to the century and more between.
I see the painting as a tribute to Maine authors as well, so in addition to Longfellow, the poet Edna St Vincent Millay and novelist Stephen King both make appearances.
On the shelves of the library are housed wonderful stories, vibrant adventures and vast knowledge. When we crack open a book the stories within and the characters living there become real around us. These characters live in our minds and hearts and can be powerful influences on us in our daily lives. The people in our favorite books may live with us for years, long after we have closed the pages of the stories they inhabit. They have been dormant, quietly waiting for us to read again. The painting tells this story.
So I opened several of my favorite books and let characters live amongst the ‘real’ people in the painting; Huck Finn created by Mark Twain, young Pip from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and, of course, Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Two other people in the painting are library patrons, checking out books. What is a library without people who want to read?
Finally, the shelves are filled with real books. I included some of my favorites and others with covers I liked. Ultimately, the books on the shelves were placed carefully to fill the painting’s compositional needs of color, value and pattern.
This painting is a celebration of written words and the beautiful historic building that keeps them safe for us.
Enjoy.
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Blind Man Boogie
watercolor on paper, 23 x 22 inches, 2017
This was inspired by an old busker I saw in the subway in Boston.
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Beyond the Sea
This mural has many unusual characters from the world of the arts. Artists often live lives a bit out of the box. Some of the people here are archetypal, some drawn from people in my life, but with my crowd I tried to tell a story of life, joy, music, sadness and hope. People who have had pain and difficulty at times can see beyond the day to day to things of deeper significance.
My fiddler looks directly at us challenging us to see more. The woman with the cigar box guitar looks off into her own collection of thoughts. The mime, a friend of old, has a half painted face, hiding part of his identity, as well as holds a full mask he has removed. The man holding the woman supports her with the care he gives the bird as well. The pregnant woman is bringing a life into the world, juggling the spheres of energy, keeping it all going.
There is caring here, and friendship and pain, but they are one troupe together.
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Summer Entourage
Oil on Canvas, 52 x 52 inches, 2016, sold
A band of artists and performers roam the dunes of Maine at Popham. I am inspired by my friends and family, who often form a tight knit band of explorers.
Maine’s summer days at the beach can have this slow light that seems to fill everything it touches, even the air seems stuffed with sea light. I paint dancers a lot, often in their off times, not performing but rehearsing, stretching or here my troupe is just walking a paced measured walk dance of the slow type of Maine summer day.
It made me very happy when a young man at a gallery opening called this piece a dance painting because of how the grasses are dancing in the breeze. I took as much care painting the grass as the people, to make the grass dance with the strolling dancers. I often paint quiet pieces, not screaming my paint or compositions, so it is satisfying when someone really sees what I was attempting.
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Tides
Oil on canvas, 2013
A friend had lost a her mother. This is a painting of an embrace of comfort, one friend to another. The woman is wrenched inside and the man is holding her giving what comfort and support he can.
I packed them into a tightly compressed, even cramped composition to accentuate the mood of tension.
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Between Stone And Sky
Between Stone and Sky, oil on canvas, 17 x 50
The islands of Maine in summer are special places. The rocky ledges thrust out of the water from the bedrock below. There are days when we can feel truly part of the wind, earth and sky. With this painting I wanted to show the rhythm, the vibration of the day, the life as it infuses the woman on this island.
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If Only
Portrait of Edna St Vincent Millay, oil on canvas 2017
I painted this portrait for the Millay Poetry Festival in Rockland, Maine in 2017. This is my vision of what she might have looked like had she not died in her 50’s.
