ABSTRACTIONS/ LETTER-BASED WORK

From left:  Red Robber, acrylic, 1971, 5'x4'; Story From This Earth, acrylic, 1971, 5'x4'

Beginning in graduate school (University at Buffalo) and continuing into the early 1980s, I was a hard-nosed (OK, sometimes a soft-nosed) abstractionist. In 1965 geometry with painterly areas seemed the way to go as I launched my first big-scale paintings. Examples are the 8-foot- high Gray Morning Vee and the giant Yellow Box (see images lower down on page). A few years later, in the era of the "stripe" painters, I sent the geometry to do penance along the edges as bright framing devices and used the central void as a place to display  spray-painted subtleties (see below Night Window, a six-foot-square painting with a separate "U"-shaped surround on three sides). 
From here I discovered the triangle, the world's most stable shape, and began a series of big paintings with three or four triangles floating on a single color filed.  I gave them awkwardness and unrelenting bluntness so that they seemed to be paintings trying desperately to fall into easy harmony but failing to do so. I wanted them to look overly-bold, like a loud-mouthed man who was rude but undeniably powerful (see two paintings directly above).  It was an art of the near-miss. (Or, should I say, the near-hit.)

    The Influence of Gravity on Color, acrylic on canvas, 1972, 5'x6'

 











Night  Window,   sprayed acrylic on
pieced canvases, 1968, 5'x4.5'

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Left: Upward Violet, acrylic on canvas, 1978, 8'x3.6'

The Row Paintings of the late 1970s organized the large, elongated canvases into bands of rectangles in order to throw all the emphasis on the interaction of the color. I was listening intently to Mozart's music at the time, and thought I might attempt to establish double arrangements of forms that run parallel to one another. In this way I set up two "musical" rows presenting two different, sometimes contrary progressions, just as in Mozart's music two musical strains would play simultaneously. Anyone who knows  Elsworth Kelly's  magnificent work will see his influence on my thinking.

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​Prices: the big paintings on canvas range from $4500 to $6000; works on paper range from $800 to $1200

The last abstractions I did in NYC in the early '70s. They became increasingly minimalist, consisting of, in some cases,  horizontal brushstrokes that created a highly regulated pictorial field sometimes  with feathered edges like I had just then run out of paint. Usually some simple irresolute shape hovered nearby or lay atop another equally irresolute shape. 










Lettering and letter-like renditions of elemental objects such as chairs, tables and vases followed the more or less pure abstractions beginning in the mid-to late '70s. At the time I was earning a meager living as a sign painter, and as an act of revenge against this lowly art form I introduced the single-stroke methodology of sign writing in a series of ink drawings and screen prints  on paper along with a number of acrylic paintings on canvas.  My goal was to establish an immediacy through the directness of my method and link that method to the often cryptic nature of the words and objects.

Old Gold, ink and wash on paper, 2001
Lettering merges with the figurative!

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Deep Purple Meets the Light, acrylic on canvas, 1975.

Vase And Vase Falling, pastel and pencil on paper, 1977, 8'x3'

Ordinary Nothing, Nothing Ordinary,​ acrylic on paper, 1977, 22x30

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Zinc Light Led, screen print, 1977, 44x28

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                 Illusion Is All, acrylic and pencil on paper, 1974, 30x19

                  Red Triangle On Shaggy Blue, acrylic on paper, 1974, 22x30

A reconstruction of the destroyed Row Painting titled The Bronze Age (circa, 1979), acrylic on canvas, 2021, 8'x3'

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Left: Yellow Box, 1965, oil on canvas, 5.3'x6'

In this early abstraction the rudiments of a geometry appears that would eventually result in the Row Paintings and Pinwheels of the late '70 and early '80s.

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            Green Into                                      Darkness, acrylic
            on canvas, 1980, 8'x3'

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​Left: Big Happy Pinwheel, acrylic on canvas, 1980, 5'x5'

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Gray Morning Vee, oil on canvas, 1965, 6'x5.3'

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 Another of the large 1965 paintings, illustrating my interest in  geometry set within atmospheric fields This one is 8-feet-high.

 The triangle series led to a  number of aggressively frontal images.           Barnett Newman's late bold shaped canvases were a source.       

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Left: Sympathy For the Devil, acrylic on pieced canvases, 1975, 5.5'x4.8' 
Above: Yellow Signal, acrylic on three pieced canvases 1975, 5'x5.5'

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