NEW WORK
Two Pieces Selected for the 91st Michigan Contemporary Art Exhibition
September 15 - November 13, 2019 at the Muskegon Museum of Art
Mountain Pass in Morning (from 16 Views of a Fuji) - Oil on Canvas
Shipping Port in Evening (from 16 Views of a Fuji) - Oil on Canvas
The Movement of Art and Apples
In the nineteenth-century, the two most famous Japanese woodcut artists - Hokusai and Hiroshige - each created a series of prints entitled "36 Views of Mount Fuji". From these came some of the most iconic Japanese imagery known worldwide, including the “The Great Wave” with Mount Fuji behind it on the distant horizon.
The effect these and other Japanese prints had on European artists of that time, especially the Impressionists, was profound. Among other things, pictorial depth and perspective in the woodcuts was highly flattened. Foreign artists began to use this technique and started to see their art very differently - as a surface holding marks, a self-contained object unto itself, instead of a "window" complying to realistic depiction.
In an updating and homage to those influential series, I am creating a series of 16 oil paintings, called "16 Views of a Fuji", where the growing, harvesting, processing, transportation and selling of a Fuji apple will be shown. - beginning in the orchards of Washington State and ending in a fruit bowl in Tokyo. As Japanese art was once being imported into the West, I have flipped this with the apples that are now being exported to the East.
So where is the apple in these two paintings? In the timeline of the series, these two images stand right at the center. The first shows the transportation of apples by truck over the Cascades Mountains. The second, the loading of the container of fruit onto a ship in the Seattle harbor sailing the Pacific to Japan.
These paintings are a reflection on the cross-exchange of culture and commercial products (the artwork themselves went abroad in the form of calendars) and the influence they have; as well as the intermixing of eastern and western aesthetic tropes, the natural world versus the urban, and extending into issues of globalization and cultural mirroring.
Three Pieces Inspired by Poetry - 2019 Ekphrastic Exhibition - Keeler Gallery
Marvelous Error of the Heart - Oil on panel - 2019
The Alone Blues - Woodcut on rice paper - 2019
Star Field - Gouache on board - 2019
Works Selected for 2019 Annual Festival of the Arts Regional Arts Competition
From Leelanau Penninsula 2 - Oil on Canvas - 2018
150 Drawings on the 150th Anniversary of Fountain Street Church
Join me on a year-long journey as I create a book of 150 drawings, inspired by the spirit, setting and history of a place I was born and grew within, Fountain Street Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. 2019 marks the 150th anniversary of this amazing community, one of the leading liberal religious institutions in the nation. And a wellspring of much that flows in my heart and soul.
