As an abstract painter, I work to synthesize influences both historic and contemporary. Painting, for the most part, occurs within the context of its contemporary culture, always against the backdrop of those who have painting in prior centuries and cultures. The end result – if the influences have been sufficiently digested – is to reveal something of our present state and hopefully works of individual vision. My work is based on the long study of Romanesque architecture, trecento Italian painting (particularly the works of Duccio and Giotto, and later the works of Piero della Francesca), the study of sacred geometry (the golden ration, etc.), and the work of a diverse group of 20th century and contemporary artists that include Piet Mondrian, Hilma af Klint, Robert Mangold, Sol LeWitt, and James Turrell. I have had exceptional opportunities to travel and study over the past 50 years, and after spending more than four decades in the greater New York City area, I have relocated to Lancaster, PA when I am painting full-time. 

The house, as a primary architectural object, the philosopher, Gaston Bachelard thought of it as an entity which embodies or condenses many sensations and as a symbol is a bridge – an intermediary – or bridge (metaxu in Greek).  He went further to say that “the house acquires the physical and moral energy of the human body….”.

“A house is first and foremost a geometrical object, one which we are tempted to analyze rationally.  Its prime reality is visible and tangible, made of well hewn solids and straight lines, the plumbline having marked it with its discipline and balance.  A geometrical object of this kind ought to resist metaphors that welcome the body and the human soul.” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1964.)

Romanesque architecture, with its ponderous compression of massive structures into which filter small shafts of light, illuminating the massive forms of the interior, has played a paramount role as an example of inhabited space.  Within these inhabited spaces, light is the unifier of all things.  Many of its structural elements relate to the human body:  the ribbing of the ceiling to the human spine, the voids of the narthex, nave, and apse to the heart, the womb, the structure of the brain, etc. Perhaps most important, the illumination of the interiors could be said to relate directly to states human consciousness and spirituality.