A major feature is the bringing together of seemingly incongruous 
types of painting - representational and abstract. As the viewer's 
eye crosses a border from realism to abstraction, the visual rules 
change. Then there's a shock to the system when abstract and realist 
images are smashed together, a jolt like sudden eyesight. Imagine 
Vermeer meets Pollock.

While the work is conceptually pluralistic in its application of 
different painting styles, the obsessive finessing of the realist 
areas takes these paintings beyond a comparison with current 
representation - allowing the viewer to apply connoisseurship that 
is normally reserved for classical realism.

Abstraction and realism share a common ability to evoke. The 
juxtaposition of the stylistic elements plays out in a 
straightforward (non-appropriated) manner. Just as there is an 
indifference to the abstraction / representation "debate", the work 
displays a tacit dedication to the act of painting. As poured paint 
can be considered a performance document, so the realist painting is 
a performance, albeit slower, with shamanistic or devotional 
overtones.

The paintings contain a dialog between the representational and the 
abstract regions; this dialog may take the form of resonant color, 
textual correspondences, or compositional devices used to move the 
eye all over the visual plane. The work is unapolegetically hot, 
content rich. A high tension gets built up between poured paint and 
the methodic representation, as if the work reveals a double life - 
by turns conventional, then illicit.

My representational work started in the late 70s leaving aside 
minimalism. In the 80s, I chose to concentrate on landscapes as an 
emotionally neutral subject. The process/action painting goes back 
to an early infatuation with Morris Louis and, of course, Jackson 
Pollock.

November 2003