I have had several solo shows in Boston (see Press section) and New York and participated in numerous group shows.
I received my undergraduate degree from Vassar College, with a minor in art, and a law degree from New York University School of Law. I later continued to study at New York’s Art Student’s League and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I practiced corporate law in New York and Boston before turning to painting full time.
The starting point for each work is that each mark is needed. This requires a rigorous approach in always stripping down, and sometimes building up, line and color. Painting offers an infinite number of ways for those marks to be placed. The disadvantage and the reason the process is so time consuming, is that finding one of those infinite options can be difficult. Going too far in either direction—building up or reducing-- in this endeavor destroys the overall design and structure, so the process demands a careful balance.
These paintings are intensely process oriented or time consuming. Despite this, the work has been influenced by photography. Notably, individuals coming out of the development of the form such as Atget to Evans and Eggleston prove instructive. Their insistence on a no nonsense, constant editing and stripping down and a powerful kind of ‘objective’ presentation and viewing are what resonate. Painting offers advantages not available in photography, all rooted in the application of paint. So, photography serves as an underpinning, with the painterly qualities offered with oils as an additional means to draw out a nuance, expressive quality special to the medium. And, the ultimate ‘finished’ painting can be somewhat like taking a photograph in that the final resolution of the painting, after much work, may occur rather suddenly.
The work also relies on certain underpinnings involving the narrative/non-narrative tension, the abstract/representation tension, and the tension between two-dimensionality and the illusion of three-dimensionality. Further, I am interested in the interplay of black and white and color variations within those broad bands together with how those colors interact to create negative and positive space. Some of the paintings are purely abstract, such as the grid paintings (both those with a tight grid and those with a looser, ambiguous grid coupled with black rectangular anchoring shapes) and some strip paintings, while others utilize language, and arguably are not fully abstract. However, in all cases, the strategy described above applies with the same goals, although with somewhat different design features.
Finally, a brief explanation about the context of the paintings that deal with language (or the ‘writings’ paintings that can be seen on this site). These paintings have an autobiographical foundation. My family lived in Germany for generations before being uprooted by the Nazis. Growing up in the United States, I didn’t learn German, but I heard it spoken by relatives and strangely find the writing of German or more accurately, German gibberish, a natural process. Nonetheless, this use of ‘language’ which comes from a deeply personal place, still is used in the service of the overriding strategies and goals discussed above.