The artworks on display highlight the beauty, the mystery, and the uniqueness of nature’s gifts to us. My hope is that viewers walk away with an awareness of the natural environment, a rededication to respect and preserve flora and woodland. There is a reverence in observing and sensing the natural. Our moods, feelings, and perceptions are influenced by a stark singular bud, a blossom, twig, or fallen branch. The quietness of barren winter branches, the glowing sunset, the wind displaying its voice are all treasures. If one observes closely, my artworks undoubtedly reveal lament, sorrow, and joy. My approach employs muted lighter or neutral areas creating a softness, a calmness. Other designs invoke a mystery through the use of analogous color schemes, contrasting colors set against dramatic rich brown, blues, and black. My use of negative space or unadorned areas limit chaos and invoke restfulness. My goal is to unify the elements of color, shape, and line to create a strong design. 

Through the years I have found it necessary to alter my approach in executing my artwork, due to limitations which are often invisible. Every brush stroke, every scratch of pencil to paper, every splash of color, every sight observed, has been a cherished gift from God. He is the strength of my life. I create when able. I also devote my life to my writing, encouraging others worldwide with the challenges of marginalized illnesses. 

I want to express my appreciation and gratitude to SCAA and all who view my artwork.

My voice speaks, my heart speaks through each unique piece.

It’s also important to recognize that every exhibition develops its own character. In selecting work, I consider not only the strength of individual pieces, but also how they come together to form a cohesive and engaging show.

I was never academically trained in art but have been painting ever since painting lessons in my teens.  I’ve learned from a combination of much practice, a study of art history, and the major influence of my artist and art educator wife Jan Ames.  We continue to inspire, critique, and learn from each other.  Jan has especially shared with me her love of art history.  Favorite artists who have influenced me include John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Willard Metcalf, and the Connecticut impressionists.  For most of my life I’ve painted in acrylic, but first started watercolor in classes with Robert Hauschild.  I’ve returned exclusively to watercolor about six years ago.  

If I am to say anything meaningful about my art it will have to involve my spiritual life as a follower of Jesus.  Unfortunately political Christianity has become such a turnoff to so many that I feel a need to distance myself from it.   As politely as possible, I can only say they appear to follow a different God than mine.

What is my vision or philosophy for my art?   It is still a work in progress.  I am still figuring that out.  In a real sense I consider myself a student of watercolor, engaged in learning, experimenting, pushing my craft.  Putting in the 10,000 hours they say you must to become an expert in anything.  Fighting the settling of my aesthetic into some recognizable form is my desire for variety, my seeking new painting challenges, trying new technique, new palettes.  

Any uniform aesthetic in my work is at a gut, instinctive, heart level.  It is not prepared strategy.  I can see patterns in my work and attempt to explain it to myself.  I paint nature.  Nature to me is peace, consolation, revival.  My work flows from my walks and hikes in my area of Rhode Island.  Hiking to me is usually my prayer time, my worship time, time spent alone with God.  That directly impacts the things seen on the hikes and eventually painted.  I am drawn to the mystery in nature, the numinous.  Nature hints at glory.  “For the earnest expectation of creation anxiously awaits the revelation of the sons of God”.   I seek to paint landscape with beauty but without the scenic.  Not facebook “Where I’ve been” but what I’ve loved.  I find myself painting beauty nearby, often at small scale.  Beauty at your feet.  Beauty in the overlooked.  I think God has a love of details, intricate patterns and geometry created by randomness, physics, chaos, and fractals.

I’m interested in perception and memory.  What we remember from our drive to work is a drastically reduced version, a few key elements only.  It is drained of the detail of the conscious experience of the moment it was perceived.  A major tradition in art tries to paint the essence of its subject:  the platonic ideal, the idea of apple, the quintessential rose.  Those are the parts that make it into human memory.  I want to paint so as to recreate the experience of the full conscious encounter with the particular rock or wave.  To attend to the beauty that delights us in person in the moment, but doesn’t get distilled into iconic memory.  To appreciate the particular.  I try to paint looser, but I’m always drawn back to and delighted in the details that are the essence of our encounter with the scene.

I believe in the resurrection, the age to come, the renewal of all things, the restoration.  We will all be bodily persons in some way or other.  I believe there will be a place for artists in that new creation and I’m working to be ready. 

  “Become a doctor…then you can afford to be an artist”. This bit of unsolicited yet sage advice offered by my father was received as it might be by many 17-year-olds: with skepticism and self- doubt. But with no professional artists in the family to guide me I chose what I thought would be the easier path, one favored by many family members: business, law, dentistry, or, medicine, and became a physician. Ultimately my chosen specialty, Diagnostic Radiology, was a compromise of sorts. Its emphasis on anatomy, contrast and spatial resolution, depth perception, and three- dimensional thinking was analogous to the concepts I would employ as an illustrator, painter, photographer, and graphic artist. Through the years I continued to refine and employ these skills, borrowing from one form of artistry, medical or visual, to compliment the other. Years later it was my instructor Mel Pekarsky, professor and chairman emeritus of the Department of Art, Stony Brook University, and renowned landscape painter, who observed when viewing my work: “It must feel good, to say the least, to be practicing two arts that heal”.  

   Other mentors have included Mavis Pusey, an abstract graphic artist who taught the importance of technique, design, and the utilization of space, as well as Cindy Horowitz Wilson and Eileen McCarney Muldoon, each educators and professional photographers, who emphasized the contribution of light, reflection, composition of the chosen subject matter, timing, and how to tell a story through the camera. Each has played a part in my development.

   Conceptually simple, my technique borrows from the masters who would compose their work based on proportion of a model whether alive or from an effigy. After recreated on paper, painting ensues. The chosen subject relates to the quality of the original photo. The time to complete a project depends on its complexity and size.

   As beneficial as all the mentorship has been it is 60 years of plugging away through high school, college, medical school, internship, residency, fellowship, and employment as a radiologist, with pencil, pen, brush, canvas, paper, paint, and the lens, that has sustained a passion for the visual arts. It has taken it from what might have been a casual hobby to a desired vocation entering my very fabric. As composed by Robert Frost:

 Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.