Photo by Arthur Simoes
For over 25 years I have made large scale paintings that document my travels — real visits to real places — to sites of the built environment that embody public sentiment or ideological concerns. Stadiums, formal gardens, bridges, museums, monuments, palaces, train stations, schools, prisons, casinos, corporate board rooms, suburban and urban housing, and ancient temples, are some of the locations that I have depicted. My interest lies in the intersection of personal and social memory. I have intentionally omitted the figure from the representation to emphasize the viewer’s participation as witness to the moment of perceiving, then remembering, these architectural spaces. In my studio, I work in acrylic on rigid panels and use an equal combination of photographs, memory, and sketches done on location, to complete the painting. Typically, the scale of my paintings is large and can range from 4 feet x 6 feet to 8 feet x 12 feet.
Travel, far and near, being there, has always been crucial to my work as a painter. I often target specific cities: Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, and most recently Liverpool and Leeds in the UK. Closer to home, I have been to Cincinnati and Chicago to develop a series of paintings about these cities, covering not only the well known or iconic, but also the more mundane or universal setting, like a subway station or stairwell. My goal has always been to make the known, unknown and the ordinary, extraordinary.