Henri Rousseau, War, 1894 Henri Rousseau hasn’t been on my radar until recently, but now that I see more of his work, it has sparked my interest and I am looking forward to seeing Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia through Feb. 22, 2026. His pictures of forests and…
Part I “Ideas may be buried and surface slowly in pieces…Or they may burst out fully formed—and scare the daylights out of you.” –author, Ian Roberts In these words Roberts describes how I found my what to the topic Altered Terrain, a subject which I explored for such a long time. Buried within, the first…
My first recollection of saving and recycling occurred when I went for a drive to the Rupert city “dump” with my dad and a bag of empty tin cans in the back seat. I was astonished to see piles of rubbish as well as discarded furniture and clothing. While exploring the heaps, I found a…
One has to be constantly on guard for the thoughts of self-doubt. It’s the artist’s bane. Artists seem always on the lookout for the myriad of excuses made so as to be absent from the studio. I used to tell this to my students. I tell it to myself every day. Since we moved to…
Fantastic Plastic “Farewell to the broom made of heath…
Henri Matisse is one of my great teachers. First, I was attracted to his linear simplified drawings that showed form through line rather than modulation indicating light and shadow. Equally intriguing was his use of color patterns, relationships and spontaneous composition. While Monet was, in a sense, a slave to nature (Rene Schwob), Matisse submits…
After moving from Virginia to Wilmington Delaware, my task was to settle into a different house and smaller studio. Unpacking seemed to take forever, so my cluttered “new” studio lay abandoned for a while. Finally, driven by pandemic quarantine, I pulled out a few collages already in progress and made myself stick to a 5…
For the past few weeks I’ve been putting together a Blurb book Altered Terrain: Changes & Consequences. The mostly black and white images were made about ten years ago. I arranged them with commentary or poetry which I have done with the series from my recent solo exhibitions. The first poem is “At This Place”…
Upon leaning of the death of Wolf Kahn, I got to thinking about his use of color and how attracted to it I was. Except for an exhibit that I saw in a small gallery on 7th Street near D Street in the late 80’s. Those works were atypical because I remember only green landscapes…