Artist with small version Bunch of Keys
I have been a painter for thirty five years,
I was born south of Boston. I grew up in an artists colony … Cape Ann Massachusetts; Rockport and East Gloucester. Artists and writers have been coming to this place since the 1800’s… In addition to the rich local tradition in painting, my mother worked as an art dealer in a gallery of Modern American Art, the Horizon Gallery. As a young teenager in the back room of that gallery I was able to get up close and personal with works of Miro, Giacometti, Picasso and other modern masters. At a very early age I began to make relationships with paintings that continues to be very personal and profound to me..
I began my art studies at 13 with George Gabin. While a senior in high school I took my first art history class at Dartmouth College. When I was seventeen I travelled to New York City and saw my first Picasso at the Guggenheim Museum. It was a life changing experience.
Later, at Montserrat College of Art, again under George Gabin, I was classically trained in the painting techniques of the masters… Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Leonardo too. My teachers in abstract painting were students of the Bauhaus School.. so the tradition of Kandinsky’s painting theory was passed to me by his students. Lastly my teacher’s teacher was Hans Hoffman…. in the school of modern easel painting I consider mine the combination of the richest traditions from the European, Bauhaus and American Abstract Expressionist schools.
I have been teaching figure drawing, painting and art history for the last twenty years. I let my students explore art history of the last 500 years until they find a period and an artist that “grabs them,” then we study that artist and period in depth.
Everything I am, know, feel and have discovered is in my paintings. All my paintings are researches into the sublime theme. Since the mid nineties the subject of my paintings has been music…. again, in the tradition of Kandinsky. This series is going into its hundreds of paintings by now. In 2000 I published a little book on music painting “the open field,” and now, on the web it is in its second edition. theopenfield.org
“Perception of beauty is reflection of consciousness”… that is the sum total of the message of my life’s work
