Our brains seem to be set up for stories. Our synapses and neurons seem to work more smoothly when there’s a story, rather than lists of facts. This was proven to me in a class on memory that I took years ago. The instructor read a list of 40 random nouns and we were supposed to write down as many as we could after she finished the list. The best anyone got was around eight words. Then she took another list of 40 random words, but this time she strung them together in a story. It was a bizarre story, but it had a flow to it. When she stopped we wrote down the words we could remember and almost everyone in the class got all 40 words!

         Since the earliest humans, painting was a storytelling medium. Almost a form of writing and in fact, some Asian alphabets are directly derived from painting. Australian Aboriginies still use a unique kind of painting to record their history and culture.

         Most of our contemporary art isn’t really about telling stories anymore the way it had been for thousands of years. Artists moved away from direct storytelling in art at the beginning of the 20^th century and artists who depicted stories in their work came to be called “Illustrators”.

          I grew up pouring over any kind of art I could find; Saturday Evening Posts, with their Norman Rockwell covers, paintings from the Louvre, ( in a book belonging to my mother, that features my crayon “embellishments”), Sears catalogs, Comic books, paintings by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Monet, Gaugin, Gainsborogh, Warhol, Johns, Dali, Lautrec, etc. I never divided art into High Art and Low Art.

          It was only when I went to Pratt Institute that I realized my contemporaries were looking down on the storytelling art of Rockwell and other illustrators. “Pure Art” didn’t seem to have or even need a story. It was just color, shape and form. The new world of shining modernity rejected stories as quaint and I felt very quaint indeed.

         I experimented with abstraction and was capable of producing acceptably “pure” art, but the stories kept creeping in. I couldn’t help it. Inevitably,  meaningless blobs of color began to represent objects or scenes and those colluded to become stories. I was a closeted illustrator!

         So when I found myself illustrating book covers for publishers, I felt like I had discovered a comfortable backwater of good old storytelling. I learned how to distill the essence of a romance story into a single momentous scene of operatic lust, one image that said it all.

Strangely enough, the “Pure Art” thing kept creeping into my illustrations. I couldn’t seem to be one kind of artist or the other. Now, abstract concepts, splashes of color and bold designs were showing up on my book covers. To make it all even more confusing, I began using illustration techniques in my gallery work.

         Along the line I noticed that there are many ways of telling a story outside the literal and logical. Borrowing from poets and songwriters, I started to hint at things, or putting together things that may not have much to do with each other but speak to us in another way.

“ These are the days of miracles and wonder,

   this is a long distance call.

   The way the camera follows us in slow mo,

   the way we look to us all.

   The way we look to a distant constellation

    that’s dying in a corner of the sky.

   These are the days of miracles and wonder,

    don’t cry baby don’t cry.”            Paul Simon

         These lyrics don’t really fit together logically, but there is so much meaning crammed into that chorus from Paul Simon’s, The Boy In The Bubble. I sense that there is plenty for baby to cry about and it has something to do with a discord between our humanity and an overload of technology and mass culture.

          In my work these days, I am often layering different elements that make no sense literally, but conspire to have meaning. In The Dreamer, there are at least three different elements interacting with each other, a woman’s head, a sunlit Live Oak tree laden with Spanish moss and a pinwheel-like pattern. These things exist in different spaces, but come together and break apart throughout the painting.

I’m not concerned with what it means when I begin the painting. As the work progresses however, they seem to become imbued with meaning. I am learning to trust the subconscious in designing these images.

           Every painting represents an evolution over time. So when we look at a painting, it’s not just a static thing, but a hologram containing the thoughts, dreams and the story of the artist, compressed into paint.

I have chosen The Dreamer  as the announcement image for my upcoming show,  The Color Of Life,  February 6 – March 2, 2015, Dabbert Gallery, Palm Ave. Sarasota.   941-955-1315

Please come to the opening 6 - 8:30 PM on February 6.

The Dreamer, 48x36" oil on canvas 2015

The Lady In The Garden  48x36" oil on canvas 2012

Mangroves Edge    32X54" oil on canvas. mounted on wood 2010

 Flamingo Waltz  30x44" oil on canvas, mounted to wood 2010