Scraping an Image Together From Memory

Being in or around an architectural environment, certain things leave an impression on me. It can be the grand scale of a building or the small moments in surface detail of the concrete.

In a painting, I recreate that mood with the texture, light and shapes associated with memory.    

During the process of searching for that combination of colors forms and edges that deliver a representation of that sensation, I use many tools. Sketches and collage help clarify the overall direction when I start. Once I jump in, I'm improvising, trying different things that give me and knee jerk reaction as to whether they work.

 

Painting an Encounter with a Building

In my paintings, I work within the theme of architectural structures. Sometimes the very buildings I find beautiful and elegant for one reason also strike me as dynamic to the point of being overwhelming.

Modernist buildings carry that kind of personality. Here I've tried reducing the angles and lines of the space into pure composition, amping up the color to match the intensity of feeling.

Why Paint This?

My work is profoundly affected by architectural memories. Recreating feelings of having been in or next to a building. The way their presence has resonated within me.

Getting back to the mood a place has left me with is not a  straightforward path. One of the techniques I use is collage.

Rebuilding the atmosphere of an experience from the impressions left in the mind's eye is like chasing the details out of vapors. I go after it until the edges, surfaces and textures appear.

What I hope to share with viewers is a very intimate fleeting moment of sensory perception.

 

Brutal Buildings

Sweeping masses of voluptuous threatening shadows bigger than the sky. Thousands of tons of concrete inexplicably floating in the air

Party

Everything set for the party. Plates lined up in rows waiting to get a slice of cake. Kids running. Popping balloons.  

Drawing

Swift angular lines of a staircase. Hallways running I don't know where. Should I climb up or just stand here?

Compositional Study

The thrill of the hard linear lines against soft sky. Light raking across textured concrete. The mystery of the shadows cast on those forms and the shapes they make.