Lowell-Larimar Road, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, copyright ©2011

This painting depicts Lowell-Larimar Road, right across from the painter Mehdi Fallahian’s farmhouse. Most of the work was completed on site, but required some additional studio work. I’ve gone back and forth about the composition and the various accessories of the rural landscape that I’ve included; the large tire pile, the concrete abutment, the empty 50 gallon drum. If one travels the backroads in search of a rural idyll, a la Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one is bound to be disappointed. Perhaps one can find Tathata in a pile of rubber tires, rotting fences and singing power lines.

J & M At Dusk, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, copyright ©2011

My most recent painting will be included in the exhibition “New Contemporary Works” at Davidson Galleries, 313 Occidental Ave S, Seattle WA 98104. The exhibition will run from December 1st through January 28, with opening receptions on the First Thursday of each month. For those interested in process, there is some information as well as state photographs on my “new and in progress” page.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (self at 17 yrs.), oil on canvas, 26X18 in, copyright ©1983

This painting was done from a photograph of me that was taken when I was 17 years of age. I was in New York City, standing in front of the New York Stock Exchange. The photographer was the mother of Annie Irwin, former wife of Jed Irwin, whom I had met in Spokane when Jed was the art curator of what was then Cheney Cowles Museum (now the Museum of Northwest Art and Culture.) I was on my way to Montreal, as I had just been declared delinquent by the U. S. Board of Military Draft, and was subject to immediate deployment to Vietnam. Many people of my age that were opposed to the war were going to Canada, to escape the draft.

I sent the photo to my mother, after I arrived in Montreal. Several years after I had returned to the States, I saw the photo amongst her things and offered to do a painting for her in exchange for the photo’s return. This painting, faithfully rendered from the original photograph, was the result.

Many years later, the painting hung on the wall in my father’s room at the nursing home where my parents resided. It was eventually lost, probably stolen, as many things of value are stolen from the elderly by the nurses, attendants and orderlies that are supposed to be caring for them. Alas, I’ve lost the photo too, a casualty of the nomadic lifestyle that artists are prone to. This image was scanned from a faded old slide, the only evidence I have that the painting ever existed.