Floratricity - April, 2009
Mixed media on canvas, 30" x 24"
Located at: Private residence (LP).

Experimental mixed-media piece. The flowers are vinyl remainders and the lower ground is woodchips and shavings so it's a blend of synthetic and nature. The flowers in the painting have a current of electricity around them, as if they are being jolted to life.

Springtime is when that strange resurrection occurs: flowers rise from their graves fresh as daisies and the world becomes alive with that new-earth loamy smell. Life returns.

For a while, this was conceptually titled something like April is the Cruellest Month and was going to be part of my T.S. Eliot series. But springtime is just too much fun and wonder to dwell on death, even metaphorically. It's about starting over and that jolt of life you get from growth.

Atacama - May 31, 2008
Mixed media on canvas, triptych configuration, 36" (3 x 12") x 12" Acrylic, marble and clay dust, paste, various glazes
Located at: My home.

This is more of a decorator piece. That is, it was done primarily to add color and blend in some furniture. As for the subject: the Atacama region is a 600-mile stretch of desert in northern Chile. It is the driest place on earth. There has never been any recorded rainfall – some scientists say no rainfall for 40 million years. It is virtually sterile. The Atacama is sparsely populated, obviously, but about a million people do live there. The Atacama is significant because I've been reading so much T.S. Eliot lately and water is a metaphor for faith in much of his work. Subsequently, deserts tend to be a metaphor for a godless and despairing human condition. Heavy texture on this one - lots of cracks and fissures. The Atacama is so vast that you can look in all directions and feel lost, like you are seeing the same thing over and over again. So, a triptych of repeating images seemed to fit.

Empathy - December 22, 2007
Acrylic on Canvas, 30" x 24"
Located at: My home.

According to dictionary.com, Empathy means "the identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another." To me, empathy means there's a point in the conversation where you soften and understand. It's nicer than sympathy. It's the soft red bit on the left hand side that does it for me, plus some entirely unintentional heart shapes.

Overall, the effect is rather like the frost you see melting on a cold windowpane.

Change of Heart - November 4, 2007
Acrylic on Canvas, 48" x 24"
Located at: Private collection (BF) (SOLD)

For this one, the hardest part was coming up with a title afterwards. Usually the title emerges along the way, but this one didn't, and knowing the customer meant I didn't want anything too girly or too pretentious or too negative. So I hit the online thesaurus and went down the internet wormhole and pondered several titles. Liking none of them, I solicited input from my immediate audience, who supplied the following:

Son (age 6): A Forest and Some Added Red. Or Blood for Murder. Or Painted Red Rocks.

Husband (age 40): (suggested several titles, mostly to do with volcanoes) and then eventually came up with Change of Heart, which is what I settled on. It's not too pithy, not too pretentious, general enough, obscure enough, short enough, and let's move on already. Phew. That's a rather long, troublesome explanation for a painting title. But there you have it.

At any rate, the title also works because the combination of textures and colors (red embers, glacial ice) represent the extremes in an emotional journey.

Fire Dunes - March 18, 2007
Acrylic on Canvas, 8" wide X 12" tall
Located at: My home.

This painting was a quick study on a small, deep canvas, then black-sided and varnished. My mission was to see how bright and crisp and smooth I could make it, so not a lot of fiddling. The fewer the strokes and the higher-quality the pigment, the better, I figure.

EKG - February 25, 2007
Acrylic on Canvas, 16" wide X 20" tall
Located at: The Beaumont Studios.

This was more of an exercise piece . Sometimes I have to remind myself on how browns and golds and reds work together. It started out as windows, then moved to buildings, then lots of molding paste and huge gobs of black later, it became this.

I think it looks more like a forest on a lake, truthfully, but that's boring: the sense of reflection and the up-and-down movement reminds me of those EKG monitors in the hospital - you know those blips on a screen that let the hospital staff know how the heart is working? Those.

There might be a cathedral in there as well. That's kind of why I called it EKG.

Brown & Gold Abstract II - April 17, 2006 & May 6, 2006
Acrylic on 6 Canvases (Sextych?), 16" x 20" ea.
Located at: Private Residence (JW)

Well, I guess this may qualify as the widest work I've ever done, now 80" wide. I had to look up the term "Quadtych" on Google, because I knew of "Diptych" (2) and "Triptych" (3) but I wasn't sure what the term for four in a row was. I'm just going to take a guess and go for "Sextych" as a term for 6 in a row (I Googled and it seems right).

Here's what I think they are, so that's how I titled them:

• #1 sometimes looks like a lit-up building, a theatre, I think, or something in the rain with lots of neon lights.
• #2 looks like a reflection on water, with boats.
• #3 was the first one I did, and I remember thinking that I'd like to call it "Diner" because it reminded me of the last open diner in a city in the rain at night. This was the first one of the series that I did.
• #4 looks like the edge of a park moving into an urban area (again, in the rain at night).
• #5 is probably my favorite: it reminds me of a fairly straightforward urban boulevard in the rain.
• #6 is less distinct, rougher. I was thinking about calling that one "Bad Side of Town."

But whatever - they are purely decorative and were fun to do.

Blue Abstract 2 - November 27, 2005
(Alternate title: Streamers)
Acrylic on Canvas, 18" X 20"
Located at: Private Residence (JW)

Yeah, I know, not a very original title, but it's a sister to the one I did before so I have a pair of 'em to frame the china cabinet that has lots of blue Denby pottery.

It actually looks better horizontal (on its side) but we needed something vertical for the other side.

It could be coral/underwater or twisted roots or weeping willow strands or vines at night. But it's mostly decorative. And yes, those thick black squeezes of paint do look a little like bird poop. Let's not go there.

Emerald City - November 6, 2005
Acrylic on Canvas, 16 X 20"
Located at: Private residence

I guess this one is kind of a city on water, but the reflection doesn't line up. Maybe it's not supposed to: sometimes reality isn't what's reflected, and that's the message.

There's also that cross thing in the middle - to me, it looks like a crucifix.

Hm ... green city (= money) + crucifix over top: juxtaposition of messages.

Ah, hell, it's not that deep. I just wanted to do something green - I'd already experimented with a brown/red palette and a blue palette, so this is my green mix.

Also, I still want to find a way to capture the beetle-green of the city at the magic hour when the sun sets. This isn't quite it, but I was trying to find the colors that could.

Autumn Leaves - Abstract, October 30, 2005
Acrylic on Canvas, 20" X 24"
Located at: My home.

I'm calling this one "Autumn Leaves" because - well, that's what I was thinking of when I painted it. There's no mystery except that I didn't know I was thinking about Autumn Leaves until about halfway through. I just drew some shapes, went, "Huh," and filled in the spaces a bit.

We get these kind of leaves on our deck all the time. When the cat dragged a leaf in one night, I leapt up on the couch and shrieked, thinking it was a dead, dried-up mouse with a tail. It was just a leaf, though: one of many.

When I was painting this, my son said it looked like fishes. I like that, too.

Art theory thought: Diagonal composition = urgency. Also, I'm still on the impasto kick, so there is lots of texture here. Here's some fun: count the leaves. How many leaf shapes can you see? I counted over 50. There's probably more.

UPDATE, Nov. 17, 2005: Well, I posted the above chatter around Nov. 7, 2005. Since then, my lovely (ex-Nurse) Mother came and helped babysit Jack for a few days. Her first impressions of the painting were somewhat more ... yonic ... [No, I'm not going to tell you; look it up.] I'm not sure whether to be embarrassed or play naïve. I guess abstracts really are in the eye of the beholder, because I swear that wasn't my intentional subject matter.

Blue Abstract - October 23, 2005
(Alternate title: Aurora Borealis)
Acrylic on Canvas, 16" x 20"
Located at: Private Residence (JW)

This was (underneath all the impasto) my first Vancouver cityscape attempt. Didn't like it, so I painted over it. I thought about sanding it down and then just decided texture is fun. It's a lot of blotches and drops, but in a weird way I can kind of see Matisse's Dancers or leaping figures, or even some kind of eye.

I didn't plan it or anything - I was just experimenting with a blue palette to match the walls in our house. It looks nice on the white wall where we put it because it picks up all the tones of the dark blue walls. It looks a little dwarfed there, though. I should have made it bigger.

Brown Abstract 1 - October 22, 2005
Acrylic on Canvas, 16" X 20"
Located at: My home.

Red and Sienna and White always look good together. My four-year-old son said it looked a little like a spider. I wasn't thinking of anything when I did this one, other than, "So how do you do an abstract, anyway?" The cool thing about abstracts is that the mind wants to make sense of them, even if the artist wasn't intending a Major Message.

So: is this a UFO? A microwave tower? Something burning? Could be. I wasn't planning on it because I was just trying to balance the colors and the texture.

I guess when I look at this one, I see a bow or a ribbon on giftwrap. It's kind of celebratory. I guess that would be the theme, if any: presents, Christmas morning fireplaces, bows, leftover gift wrap.

Oh, really, I just made that up. But it fits, doesn't it?

I actually like the painting more when I think about how it reminds me of a gift-wrapping. It makes more sense to me - aha, the mystery of modern art.