Recent Paintings
"Honorable Terms" (2021 No.7, state 5), oil on canvas, 52x57⅞ inches, {"The roots of reason are imbedded in feelings — feelings that have formed and accumulated and developed over a lifetime of personality-shaping. These feelings are not a source of weakness but a resource of strength. They are not there for occasional using but are inescapable. To know what we think, we must know how we feel. It is feeling that shapes belief and forms opinion. It is feeling that directs the strategy of argument. It is our feelings, then, with which we must come to honorable terms." - James E. Miller, Jr., "Word, Self, Reality: The Rhetoric of Imagination" (1972)}
"Fool's Cap Too Long" (2021 No.6, state 3), oil on canvas, 63x57¾ inches, {"We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions.... But life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, 'Let there be an entrance for me into realities, I have worn the fool's cap too long.'" - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Use of Great Men," from the collection of essays, "Representative Men" (1850)}
"Gonna Speak to the Crowd" (2021 No.5, state 11), oil on canvas, 64x57⅜ inches, {"I'm gonna spare the defeated — I'm gonna speak to the crowd. I'm gonna spare the defeated, boys, I'm going to speak to the crowd. I am goin' to teach peace to the conquered. I'm gonna tame the proud." - Bob Dylan, "Lonesome Day Blues" (2001)}
"The Opposite of Indifference" (2021 No.4), oil on canvas, 54x51 inches, {"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Because of indifference one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that's being dead. His or her neighbor are of no consequence. Their hidden or visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an Abstraction." - Elie Wiesel, "US News & World Report" (27 October 1986)}
"No Living Thing Can Exist Without It" (2021 No.3, state 10), oil on canvas, 58x56 inches, {"Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it." - Boris Pasternak, "Doctor Zhivago" (1958)}
"In the Lost Negative" (2021 No.2, state 8), oil on canvas, 49¾ x58½ inches {We only live between before we are and what we were. In the lost negative you exist... Three ages in a flash: the same child in the same picture, he, I, you..." - Robert Lowell, "For Sheridan"}
"Startle & Lay Siege" (2021 No.1, state 9A), oil on canvas, 36x45 inches {"I was learning at seventy-one what it is to be deranged. Proving that self-discovery wasn't over after all. Proving that the drama that is associated usually with the young as they fully begin to enter life... can startle and lay siege to the aged." -Philip Roth, "Exit Ghost"}
"Stubborn & Egotistical" (2020 No.4), oil on canvas, 67½x55 inches {"If we've learned anything from the best-selling 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' children's book series, it's that those who see themselves surrounded by idiots are usually idiots themselves." -Jakob Augstein, "Stubborn and Egotistical" (Spiegel Online, 3/25/2013)}
"Amidst a Falling World" (2020 No.3), oil on canvas, 66¼x57¼ inches {"Should the whole frame of nature around him break, In ruin and confusion hurled, He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, And stand secure amidst a falling world." - Horace (65-8BC), "Odes", book 3, no.4, I.52)}
"Clever Liars" (2020 No.1), oil on canvas, 56½x47½ inches {"Clever liars give details, but the cleverest don't!" - anonymous}
"Your Decisions Matter" (2020 No.2), oil on canvas, 52x55½ inches {"It's essential that you believe as if your decisions matter... reality isn't important; what's important is your belief..." - Ted Chiang, "Exhalation", 2019}
"Inertia to Movement" (2019 No.6, state 4), oil on canvas, 64.5x64.75 inches {"Emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light, or from inertia to movement, without emotion." -Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious", 1955, translation R.F.C Hull}
"Gunfire Across My Consciousness" (2019 No.5, state 9), oil on canvas, 48.5x32.5 inches {"My mind is just like a spin-dryer at full speed; my thoughts fly around my skull... Images gunfire across my consciousness... I jump in awe at the soul-filled bounty of my mind's expanse." -Christopher Nolan, Irish Writer on his reasons for writing "The Eye of the Clock", in November 8, 1987 "Observer"}
"Something Else Entirely" (2019 No.4, state 26), oil on canvas, 38.5x62.5 inches {"And you’d spend years trying to decipher the sentence, until finally you’d understand it. But after a while you’d realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant something else entirely." - Tadeusz Dąbrowski, from the poem "Sentence"}
"Doublethink" (2019 No.3, state 8), oil on canvas, 68x58 inches {"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." -George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty Four" (1949)}
"How's It Gonna End" (2019 No.2), oil on canvas, 60x33 inches {"And I want to know the same thing everyone wants to know, how's it going to end? Drag your wagon and your plow over the bones of the dead out among the roses and the weeds. You can never go back, and the answer is no, and wishing for it only makes it bleed." -Tom Waits, song lyric}
"The Doctrine of Liberty" (2019 No.1), oil on canvas, 67x59.5 inches {"I believe there is a golden thread which alone gives meaning to the political history of the West, from Marathon to Alamein, from Solon to Winston Churchill and after. This I chose to call the doctrine of liberty under the law." -Anthony Sampson, "The Changing Anatomy of Britain", 1982}
"Seriously?" (2018 No.10, state 14), oil on canvas, 49.8x62.5 inches {"All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously." - Hermann Hesse, "Reflections", ed. Volker Michels, 1974}
"Chaos, Stillness & Prayer" (2018 No.9), oil on canvas, 54x36 inches {"Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm.... an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction." -Saul Bellow, "Writers at Work: Third Series", 1967}
"Burnt Norton" (2018 No.8), oil on canvas, 66.5x70.5 inches {"What might have been is an abstraction; Remaining a perpetual possibility; Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory." -T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"}
"Along for the Ride" (2018 No.7), oil on canvas, 65x53 inches {"Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong... and just go along for the ride." - Philip Roth, "American Pastoral"}
"The Intervening Tick" (2018 No.6), oil on canvas, 49x33 inches {"Is that where wise men want us to live; in that intervening tick, the tiny slot that occurs after you have spent hours searching downtown for that new club and just before you give up and head back home?" - Billy Collins, "The Present", from "New Ohio Review" 2017}
"Adjective" (2018 No.4), oil on canvas, 77x64 inches {"As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out." - Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson" (1894) chapter 11}
"Chocorua" (2018 No.5), oil on canvas, 40x64 inches {"A substitute for all the gods, This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua" - Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar", verse XXI}
"Weoman" (2018 No.3), oil on canvas, 43x48 inches {"I could not get a rhyme for Roman, And was obliged to call it Weoman." -Marjorie Fleming, "Sonnet"}
"Catch-22" (2018 No.2), oil on canvas, 41x48 inches {"If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to." - Joseph Heller, "Catch-22", (1961)}
"Cave" (2018 No.1; state 6), oil on canvas, 68x53 inches {"At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Bernice Bobs her Hair" (1920)}
"2017 No.14" (state 19), oil on canvas, 63x63 inches
"2017 No.13", oil on canvas, 63x71 inches
"2017 No.10", oil on canvas, 50x63 inches
"2017 No.2", oil on canvas, 74x55 inches