Black and White
Sketches
Acrylic Paintings
Black and White
Sketches
Artist Statement: No Method to the Madness
Majority of the paintings exhibited in the Bumpgate Gallery were rendered in
acrylics and applied to canvas—a small number of the works were created with a
brush daubed with black paint or charcoal pencil and applied to paper.
The themes displayed came about purely by whim. No method to the madness. Rather than paint what I see, I prefer to see where the painting wants to go.
Over the past fourteen years my works have been
paraded before a general audience on four different occasions. In the art light
of public display, the public has responded kindly at each of the quartet of
one-woman art shows.
A sampling of where a few of my collectors have
taken the canvases:
I hang in the kitchen of a ranchero in Buenos Aires; in an airy atelier in Vancouver; in the foyer of some fancy digs in San Antonio; all over the house of a Houston magazine publisher; in the gallery of Houston’s most famous interior designer; over the toilet in the bathroom of Texas ranch woman; in all three rooms of a high rise boutique apartment in Dallas; over the dining table of a cartoonist; in the trailer of a genius; over the fireplace of a staunch Republican; inside a fishing cabin near Houston’s nuclear plant; in a hallway in the Pokonos; in the game room of a FOB in Little Rock; in the homes of several chefs, several alcoholic lawyers and one CPA; in the baby’s room in San Francisco; over a safe where this guy keeps his illegal stash, and one canvas travels around the world with a lady who was somehow connected to Howard Hughes (I forget the story).
My work has appeared on magazine covers, billboards, on T-shirts, in print advertising, on greeting cards and one painting—entitled Bruised & Glazed—was purchased to be used as the CD cover design for singer Denice Franke’s Certain Records recording: Comfort.
I sometimes paint for hire, taking commissions to do portraits (if the requester understands that my sense of proportion is skewed and that my images are always painted off the edge of the canvas).
General consensus agrees that my style is primitive and unschooled; and even if I start out serious and pretty, a comic element sneaks in. To begin a canvas I do not draw or sketch, neither do I plan. The brush is allowed to fall where it may. Stepping back from the easel at conclusion of an art work, I am just as surprised as the next fellow..
I like to paint people. People in various stages of undress, people sipping cordials at the cocktail hour, people smoking, people musing, people amusing, people plying their trades if the trades tickle my imagination, people of fantasy. I also like to paint animals that live in Africa—mostly lions and monkeys.