Sandia 2006

Collection of Bill and Barbara Carson, Ft. Collins CO

Chico 2005detail 

Spanish Queen National Forest 

Jemez Spring NM

The Bodhi Manda Zen Center where I have stayed while painting in the Jemez Mountains. When the paintings were too wet to move, they were left to dry in one of the guest rooms.

Spanish Queen @ Jemez

The "Spanish Queen" was the name of the area in the US Park Service where I painted. It is also a favorite area for flying fishing for trout.

Spainish Queen Trail #1

 

Jemez Spanish Queen Trail

 

Winter 2006

Last year I exhibited in November at the Bonnafont Gallery on Greenwich Street in San Francisco. I also participated in two exhibitions in the Adirondacks during the summer.
In early summer of 2006 furniture maker Michael Swanson and I will exhibit in a joint show at the Art Mission in Binghamton NY. Large paintings are on exhibition at the New Federal Courthouse in Scranton and in ArtWorks at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.

Ten years after abandoning formal landscape painting to explore the more direct act of freely applying paint to a surface without a representational motive, I have developed a new vocabulary; light and dark, warm and cool, making marks, brush-strokes like heart-rhythms.

Every day is a test of each painting's ability to stand on its own. Each painting is subject to being changed, to being reworked or scraped and repainted as long as it remains in the studio.

Where I used to attempt to 'make a picture,' now my concerns are the energy of light, the mass of space, the emotions of shadows. I want the painting to meet the viewer somewhere in the middle, where the viewer brings his own experiences to bear in understanding and feeling what he is seeing. I want my paintings to achieve the complexity and density of poetry or of a symphony, to build suggestive layers, implicit felt meaning, not merely to be bit of colors to seduce the eye. I want my paintings to be accessible to children as well as adults, and to be so simply and directly painted that it shows the act of painting for the joy and excitement of it.

Proof is in the viewing.

My address here is: hermosastudio@gmail.com