1979 Mythic Achilles

Painting before my first Gallery shows in 1984.




In the later seventies, Jean Michel Basquiat's subconscious grafitti and Keith Haring's negative positive drawing were highly visible on every street corner in downtown.





Severe Richard Serra sculpture was on Franklin St and at the Rotary near the Tunnel. Frank Stella was making his Painted Birds and Julian Schnabel was making a splash.











There was a lot of downtown painting like Ron Gorchov and Thorton Willis, seen maybe at Magoo's Bar, or in lots of shows beginning to happen around Soho.


I went back and forth between abstract and figurative camps for a while till I realized I could combine the two.

1980

Following the paper paintings, I made these large oil paintings. In those days it seemed everything needed to be large if you really wanted to mean it.

We used to talk of a painting as a shield that one held like a knight, on ones forearm as an identity.





There seemed also an elemental magic in the way the forms reversed.





I used to say "like the clap of ones hands, There! at the surface" That was the yellow and red surface, the, as I've said most recently, the Here Now!





I then dove into the space of painting looking for Mythic form, not sure what that was. I read about automatic writing and such, of the surrealists and of the Mythic that Pollock, Newman, Gottlieb, and Rothko, all of the Abstract Expressionists were interested in at first before the form itself took over as the discovery.





I didnt really believe in the automatism as the forms took on the form of what ever one was looking at culturally.

The juxtaposition of Surface and Depth, in shield and the field, is the oldest of my forms I still employ.

1986

1986, Woman With Clothes Blowing In The Wind or Blue Figure

In the painting named above, titled after a Goya print, I masked a blue stained canvas with tape and painted over the square with the black and white oil paint.

The deeper blue stained square, when the tape was pulled off, would be physically behind but hover in tension to the black and white, painting surface.

Later, I further balanced this idea, with colored squares in front painted over the black and white the blue behind but all vibrating in tension as the pictures surface.





I describe this in detail as the pictorial ideas from this time were my discoveries of the surface still important to me today.

The overlay I used was popular then, I felt mine to be structural of ideas rather than what soon became decorative in Soho 80’s.

1984-1990

I refer to the whole of the Anne Plumb Paintings as "The Romance Quest" this is a literary phrase for what was popularized as the Heroes Journey. This is a psycological picture of the mind, I understand, searching for an Idea.

The paintings I made in the 1980’s still hold interest for me and there is a large representation of them here in my slides.
It was a time of bringing abstraction and figuration together. Older ideas of the figure were replaced by newer, and now maybe questionable theoretic appropriation.

It was a fertile time and many of the ideas concerning abstraction were created that are still in use today such as juxtaposition and overlay.

I found I could paint the figurative landscape as a metaphor for interior more abstract feelings. Pollock and Ryder were the an inspiration.





They were all large paintings often 10 feet in one direction. I used oil paint and a black and white palette was the most direct expression of what I was after.

I had my first show in NYC at the Anne Plumb Gallery, in Soho. These early paintings and my career were successful. I won an award at the American Academy for a younger painter.

1970- 1983

“we never lived in a time
When mythology was possible”
W. Stevens, A Mythology Reflects Its Region


1970 School of Visual Arts
I went to the School of Visual Arts in 1970 and attended Skowhegan in 1972.


I was trained as a figurative artist, having worked for the artist, Paul Georges and knowing Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher in the 1970’s out on Long Island.











I knew as many abstract painters, a girlfriend was assistant to Helen Frankenthaler.
It became an idea to me to add an image back to Abstract Expressionism.





I had a painting studio in Tribeca, and worked building Soho lofts doing sheetrock to make money. I was teaching in California in 1980 through 1983, going back and forth.