Fragmentation
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The concept of fragmentation entertains to the notion of parts to the whole. If a puzzle arrives in pieces in a box it will take some figuring to assemble the picture in its totality. It's possible that connecting the parts is about how we form our sense of wholeness or completeness rather than recreating someone else's fiction. The landscape paintings made during graduate school in the late 70s are a glimpse into this idea. This concept runs across several bodies of work but lands in consciousness in 2006 with the large painting Yellow Brick Road and the subsequent Remnant paintings.
 Glass Flowers(2023—2024) |
 Fluttering (2020) |
The Garden
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After visiting Buchart Gardens in Victoria, I returned home with a bounty of photographs of flowers. I was struck by my ability to fall into the beauty of that particular place. I fully understood the seduction of beautiful gardens and the solace they offered to visitors. I resisted the beautiful as an abstract painter, looking instead for a way to open the viewer's assumptions about how a painting might serve to expand one's being. My paintings resisted beauty as an intentional experience. I preferred to engage the viewer in curiosity, even resistance. But the experience in Victoria suggested there was something to consider about the heartfelt experience of beauty. So I committed to a project that would bring my preference for disorder up against the subject of beauty in a large-scale abstract composition. On this scale, a painting is in a conversation with the artist. It is a slow process because I was breaking my own assumptions about what a painting could be. There were times when the two panels were removed and placed in storage for a few weeks at a time. There were long stretches when we could only look at each other remorsefully, wishing to be done with the process. I threatened to paint over the painting. After six years of being in a relationship with this painting, I asked ChatGPT if the painting was finished. The response astonished me with favorable observations and what might be called insight into the intentions that I had struggled with over time. The final decision about completion was left to me. In November 2025, I finally called the painting by name, The Garden of Eve, and declared it finished.
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