This first entry into what should be an ongoing blog about my painting process and the images
i use as " memory tools" for painting is a complex one for me.

Where to begin?  The beginning of the process goes back to 1997, when i first began to allow recognizable imagery into my painting process. Prior to that,from the early 1980's onward, my paintings had been purely non-objective abstracts.The narrative as to why this transition occurred is long, maybe too long for this first entry... so allow me to condense the narrative for this first.


The transition from pure abstraction to ...whatever my painting process is now, came about thru a growing awareness of my own changes in memory processing, and a sense that it's change , growth, and dissolution marks us all and our progress thru this, our own lives, and the pooling of all the lives that came before us.

My first trip to Ireland in 1996 played a major part in the transition. Unfortunately, the photos from that trip and subsequent trips thru 2000 were shot in analogue film, and aren't available for this blog site, just yet....

but the images from 2001onward are...some 25,000 of them. That statement is daunting to me. I use these images as "memory prompts" for my paintings. Each one was usually taken in a fairly spontaneous manner, it's intent more as a visual tool for memory prompting later in my painting process than as a photographic document in and of itself. I rarely gave much attention to the technical details of composition and lighting, trading those elements for spontaneity of image acquisition without concern for aesthetic processing. These images were tools in service to something else, something beyond the documentation of that moment.

The resulting photos, dozens and dozens of them, would serve in the creation of a painting about and in effect the creation of a new evocative form.

So, herein and hereon, I'm going to post some of my thoughts about "IT ALL", about the whys and wheres, the whats and whatnots, of my paintings and photos.


I hope you enjoy!