At left, 15th century Incan tunic in checkerboard pattern; at right, Bridget Riley, Movement in Squares, 1961, tempera on board

I love language and the words that make up language. One of those favorite words is reciprocity. I like the sound of it, its inherent rhythm. And I like the concepts it embodies, among them, a sense of dual and complementary enhancement and exchange, something approaching fulfillment by virtue of each completing the other, whomever and whatever each and other are. In a visual conversation, I think of it as the supportive interchange between elements, whether they be formal and spatial, of or about shape or color correspondence, dimensional and kinetic, or static, fixed in time. The corresponding elements might be ephemeral, subject to external forces or containing within themselves their own dissolution. They might be malleable, changeable, pliant in new associations and responsive to unexpected visual liaisons. The best of these often have universal relevancies that exceed the ability of one culture or one geographic region to contain or isolate them.

Athanasius, 1999, 46” h x 66” w (full and detail views); collection of the Racine (WI) Art Museum

Another word and notion that intrigues me is liminal. I’ve periodically been able to locate threshold states, moments of being between things or experiences, not quite dream spaces but not fully realized either. Sometimes I’ve found them in the studio. They’re where we find ambiguity, and I feel that the tensions quivering between the ambiguous and the concrete are where we discover things about our creative impulses and tendencies that surprise our more prosaic selves. The challenge always has been to “abracadabra” just those fluid conditions in the studio or work space when they can be most useful. We almost never know what the precise trigger will be, but we collect prompts hoping that something will ignite.

Painted dockside boating/fishing cabins, Lac de Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Bridget Riley, Transition [stripe to rhomboid], 1984, pencil and gouache on paper, 11 3/4” h x 18” w

Tropical, 1998, 35.5” h x 48.5” w; private collection



The word reconnaissance means much the same in English as in French, though the notion of gratitude that it describes is a strictly francophone usage. A lot of the time artists spend in galleries and museums, in libraries and, today, web surfing, is reconnaissance – reconnoitering, taking the measure of the field, noting landmarks and signposts in other artists’ works or in the vast historical, aesthetic and material culture storehouses that are waiting to be excavated, their content waiting to be transposed, to be quoted or excerpted, to be given new uses and meanings by virtue of the fresh and original interpretations that might be applied to them. Simply put, it’s the act of doing research, of incubating imagination and innovation.

Birthmark, 1999, 40.5” h x 75.5” w (full view followed by two detail views);  private collection.



In creating the Iconographies pieces, including those shown here, my reconnaissance had me detouring wherever my travels took me and whenever I could make the time, to museums and galleries of anthropology and the arts of first peoples, where I could spend reliably undisturbed hours considering the ingenuity of early makers through the objects on display. I’d make a beeline for out-of-the-way towns and villages where residents had managed to safeguard and maintain centuries-old vernacular and church architecture resonant of accumulated experience and memory, places like Uzès and Colmar in France, Regensburg in Germany, Lavenham in Suffolk, England, and so many more.

There was always a richness of inspiration too in libraries and bookstores both new and used. There I found long-forgotten or brand-new reprints of compendia of all sorts of esoteric visual knowledge and artifacts that helped me fill out an ever-useful and indispensable personal library. My cherished copies of books like Carl Schuster and Edmund Carpenter’s “Patterns that Connect” and George Meurant’s “Abstractions aux royaumes des Kubas” and “Mbuti Design,” collected along my peripatetic way, in addition to innumerable exhibition catalogues of art, artifacts, and miscellany, all continue to nurture imaginings and to satisfy the type of intellectual inquiry that new works arise from.  

Above, in my Somerset Village (MA) studio, sometime in the late 1990s, piecing a repeat that would find its way into Wall 2, shown in full and detail views below.



Maybe because I am by nature far more comfortable with order than with disorder (and I realize this may lead you to think what a dull person I must be), I’m drawn to the art of taxonomy, the implementation of systems of classification, the end goal of which is some measure of understanding that disorder cannot offer. It’s a word that both looks and sounds serious, one that seems to want to be taken seriously. It’s usually applied in the sciences, but has its place in the arts, and in the studio. Taxonomies of form, of colors and groups of colors and their expressive capacities, of weights and values that invest visual compositions with their nuances – this is the malleable stuff where invention incubates. Sets of visual tools or materiel, compartmented cerebrally and always at the ready to help convey sensations, impressions, and perceptions, provide makers with ways to articulate specific and targeted communications, and help them make art resonant.

In taking the measure of my work as I’ve been doing in these blog entries, I realize I'm trying to make sense of it as much for myself as for anyone. I suspect there’s more in it than even I can bring up.

Wall 2 (full view, and detail view below), 1999, 64” h x 53.5” w; private collection

“Words tend to distance us from experience, but words can, at times, get us closer to experience. This apparent contradiction suggests there must be different kinds of words or different groupings of them.” *

– Enrique Martinez Celaya

*Martinez Celaya, Enrique, On Art and Mindfulness, Whale and Star Press and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, ©2015, p. 37.