Artist Statement
The current series, the Teresa Paintings, are works which focus on the artist’s wife, in the landscape of the shared family home on the Hudson River. These layered images reflect both the painter’s long-standing involvement in depicting the landscape, and his strong personal feelings for this specific place. These paintings are, as well, intimate portraits of Teresa, and her own relationship to this setting, as a gardener and landscaper.
The works continue the artist’s interest in using varied styles of painting to represent the landscape at different times, often within the same work. As portraits, these paintings augment the shifts of perception with shifts of feeling and persona. There is, at the same time, a tendency for the portrait to morph into the landscape, in a variety of ways.
The works are all painted on two or more sheets of transparent acrylic plastic. The process is an intuitive one, with the image developing and changing in stages that are not always predictable. Most of the paintings start with the landscape, often with the position for the face or figure masked out. These images are then painted on a plastic sheet positioned beneath the landscape image. The colors are built up in successive layers and worked on simultaneously from the bottom layer up and from the top layer down. The figure/ground relationship is crucial, so edges or the lack of them are important. A painting may be resolved in a week or sometimes it is left for a year, until the season returns.
Painting on the plastic sheets is technique for layering disparate ways of imagining reality, rather than simply reconciling them. This approach is reflected in the multiple portraits in these paintings and in representing landscape itself, which for artist is charged with memory and emotion. These works also embody the artist’s thoughts about time, simultaneity, and metamorphosis.
This work invites viewers to experience for themselves the painter’s love of the visible world and his sense of the mutability of experience. These paintings encourage the viewer to participate in the work both visually and emotionally, allowing it to resonate with their own feelings and sensibilities.
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