The Dreads
I have always been intrigued with mops: their voluminous shapes and textures. I had initially used a couple mops on the heads of some home-made scarecrows in my vegetable garden and then I decided to use one of them as dread locks for a sculpture of Edgar Allen Poe that I created for a show celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth. I called the piece ‘The Dreads.’ Later I found another mop a couple more pieces.
A few months later after having found several more mops I was coincidentally invited to submit some work for a show called 'Shakespeare Interpreted.' The Dreads seemed like perfect foils. Shakespeare's 'Richard III' is about a hunchbacked tyrant who brutally eliminated all of his rivals including his wife and son as he rose and consolidated his power. I decided to portray his victims as 'mop-heads on pikes'.
On the wall behind the heads is one of my paintings titled, "Alas Dear Yorick, I Hardly Knew Ye" in which Hamlet contemplates his relationship with his long dead friend, Yorick, a court jester.

Loners

Sometimes with all my artist reviewing , reevaluating, and reworking work I occasionally commit the sin of overkill. It can happen to a painting if I should paint some out as well to my drawings. In this case I overdid it with a set of large portraits that I had transformed into collages, that I really liked. At one point I tried to camouflage a few smudges that lead to some touching up with paint. As one thing lead to another, before too long the drawings which had just the right amount of spontaneity and texture disappeared. What emerged were entirely new pieces, basically paintings on paper. I literally grieved at what they had become. In an effort to try to reclaim what had been lost I attempted to recreate new versions of them. The results were quite compelling, but nothing like what I had envisioned. Also the original drawings were portraits I made 30 years as I looked into a mirror. I drew a young man. Now, much to my distress and bemusement, what I saw and drew was an old man. Although physically the portraits do not like me, the essence is still present.

A step too far

One of the good things about how I work is that I have a hard time deciding when a work is finished. I have a tendency to constantly review and evaluate what I am doing and what I have done. This approach affects much of the work that I created in the past as well what I am creating in the present. Paintings, drawings, etchings, all have undergone the same critical ‘treatment.’ Nothing is sacred. I have always felt that one cannot compromise the entire piece for the sake of a detail. On the other hand there is no reason why a really great detail cannot be reapplied and integrated into another piece. In many cases I build on what came before. I never paint over. I build on the images that preceded. It is also one reason why I began working with collage. The process is like using patches to plug holes. For the most I am pleased with the reinvention. But there unfortunately are times when I wished that I had left well-enough alone. Here are series of how a piece evolved over the years going from spontaneous and energetic to opaque and stilted. And the final result is OK as a piece of art work but I wish in retrospect that I had left it alone.

Pixels Revisited

A year ago I created these first versions of woven portraits I called Pixels. They were made by weaving two similarly proportioned pen and ink portraits together after having cut them into strips. I have added light washes of color to enhance the definition of the features, hopefully without compromising the dissonance that I had originally attempted.

Weaves

In my quest to weave I found a bag full of paper scraps that I had used in other projects . (Me, throw anything away?) Usually in various stages with no specific order I cut, paint and weave strips into

8”-10” squares and rectangles. Adding more washes of color and affixing the pen and ink features I create the portraits. Another source of material came from kids’ (classroom) rejects, mess ups, that would have ordinarily ended up in the trash. I collected them and cut them into strips to be woven as well.

I liked the rawness of the pieces but still something was missing. I had been basically following the same routine for about a year and a half, randomly weaving the strips and adding the features without any embellishment. Then on a whim and in a fit of spontaneity I decided to experiment on a couple pieces adding highlights and color for more definition. I liked what saw and within moments I began to attack entire batch of weaves, all 130 of them. Within a few hours I had finished. It took me another bunch of hours to photograph and upload them. But the results speak for themselves.

Ups and Downs----Tesselations

Ups and Downs----Tesselations

As a printmaker I enjoyed creating repetitive images that are virtually the same but for a few subtle differences. Almost any time I discover multiples I am compelled to organize them in series. I have a shoe box that contains a variety of selected exhibition announcements, some dating back 30 years. I was not sure what to do with them but because there were so many of them it seemed like a pity to throw them away. And I’m glad didn’t because a few days ago I pulled out the box again and decided to play around with them again.
I few years ago I had taken some of these same cards out, cut them up and arranged them into repetitive tessellated patterns just to see what they looked like. I liked what I saw. But then I put the show box away and forgot it, and the dozens of cards in the box.
Recently I pulled the box out again and contemplated the cards with fresh eyes. I made some beautiful little samples with water color and ink and collage. The first two series I created were called ‘Lins’ and ‘Strips’. But then as I studied all of the multiples they reminded me of tessellations and how repetitive images and shapes lead to quite exciting and unexpected patterns. These pieces are some of the results.

Strips

From the same stash of postcards from a long ago exhibit of mine which featured a black and white photocopy of me and that I also used to create the Lins, I thought I would experiment once again with the elements of dissonance and distortion. I am fascinated by how even when using the same components, in this case cutting the photos into strips, I can drastically manipulate the shape and appearance of the image simply by how I arrange and organize them.