I found myself going through portfolios of older paintings that were created while living in New York. It was a revelation to look at them again after so many years. I noticed good ideas that had been put aside when I moved to Florida.

Florida seemed like a new chapter, requiring a fresh start. Up to that point, I had been working a lot with acrylic on paper, especially my favorite quirky, uneven but beautiful handmade Indian paper. My starting point was usually a representational image, a photo or a sketch from life, that I played with, back and forth from abstraction and realism. I liked that place between the two.

Pattern, either painted or collage, was used in most of the work from that period. It created a wonderful contrast with the more realistic passages and brought the whole thing to the surface. This broke the three dimensional illusion that realism tries so hard to achieve, however the way it was used often integrated into the real image.

It was my kind of abstraction, one that played with paint, colors and textures and the very idea of “realism” itself. I was influenced by Picasso’s beginning forays into cubism, when he was reducing things down to flat shapes that vaguely described something in the real world, a guitar, a table, a wine glass, for instance.

I imagined that Picasso, like me, was frustrated with the conventions of realism. When an artist begins a realistic painting, it is full of potential. It’s a very abstract composition at that point. However, the “rules” of realism quickly close in and the artist finds all the other ways of seeing the world, crushed by the disciplines of perspective, shading, light and shadow.

Realistic painting can be very beautiful and I love that kind of art. Just look at my body of work and you will see it is the basis for all my paintings. That being said, I always feel there is something exciting about challenging realism, pushing the boundaries as far as they can go and still somehow represent the real world.

I was also influenced by the look of Japanese prints. In traditional prints it is common to have a flat panel in a solid color, floating above the image. These would have some script on them, but to me they just looked like interesting design elements.

When I started incorporating flat rectangles into my representational work, they quickly became part of the composition, balancing something else in the image. Because there were no words on them, they no longer had the purpose of the ones found in Japanese prints. They were there in my pictures only for their visual interest.

At the time when I was creating these pieces, the home computer was non-existent. The technological tool that I used heavily was a high quality copy machine. The toner was permanent and didn’t run when painted over with water-based paints. I would copy found patterns from odd sources, like the inside of security envelopes, which often had wonderful designs inside. The copy machine could also enlarge and reduce, as well as print on clear acetate, which could be flopped to create a reverse image. The efforts I went to trying to do what can easily be done now on computers, were very labor intensive. Yet they had their own beauty.

I could take a small pencil sketch and blow it up 300%, glue it down on an in-progress acrylic painting and paint over it. Photography has long been part of my work. However, using a photograph in my paintings then required a projector, a slide viewer, a copy machine and lots and lots of drawing.

When computers and programs like photoshop became good and affordable enough to be used by artists, I took to them enthusiastically. All the things I had been trying to do the hard way suddenly became easy. And yet, looking at the work from that period, I see there was a unique visual quality to the paintings I was creating. A time and set of techniques that can never be repeated.

More importantly,

 REF ZONE, acrylic and collage on handmade paper22x29 inches 1998

GRIZZLY GIAN T 1, Acrylic and collage on handmade paper, 30x 23 inches 1995

LARGE TEMPLE, KATHMANDU, acrylic and collage on handmade paper, 30x23 inches, 1995

DOORWAYS AND PEFESTRIANS, acrlic and collade on handmade paper, 1989

I’m seeing the coolness of the ideas I developed then and I’m bringing them back now. My techniques are different now, but the visual language of that time translates just fine into now.