A THORN IN MY SIDE

I thought I was done with them, those strange plants that seemed to have arrived from an alien world where the rules governing growth and form were entirely different from those I knew.

Now, they were back, knocking at the door of my imagination, asking me if I might consider returning to a subject that I thought I’d finished with earlier in my career, cacti. 

Back then, I was more interested in form and color than in the plants themselves. As a watercolorist, I was able to explore both of these aspects by disconnecting cacti - plants I’d first awakened to on a visit to Arizona — from their natural surroundings. I saw them as solitary figures, divorced from the landscapes where they lived and thrived. The watercolors of that period may have been more about painting than about cactus.

Maybe that’s why cacti were beckoning to me some 40 years later. Were they insisting that I take another look?

Hence, the title of this series, “A Thorn In My Side”. The plants weren’t finished with me.

Not that they totally had vanished from my life. There’s an anthropomorphic, kitschy side of cacti that has inspired many silly interpretations  -  salt and pepper shakers, tableware and other semi-useful items. After I received a few cactus salt-and-pepper shakers as gifts, I began to collect them. These often whimsical creations still amuse me. My collection now numbers close to 500.

Silliness aside, this series marks a return for me in other ways, notably a return to water color. For almost two decades I had been working in oil and acrylics. I thought I’d reached the end of my interest in watercolor as my primary medium, but if I were going to take another look at these strange plants, I might as well do it in the medium in which I first confronted them.

As I began painting, I realized that I didn’t want to shortchange the bizarre and beautiful intricacies of these plants, not that I wanted the paintings to be representational. Without being literal about it, I needed to create a feeling that each cactus was connected to its environment. The precision of drawing and pattern became more important to me than they had been in the past. It felt as if I were paying off a debt.

At the same time, I felt free to bring my sense of color and organization to the work. The cacti, which can be seen as one of nature’s abstractions, became a jumping off point for my imagination. Watercolors were enhanced with acrylic flourishes that helped emphasize patterns and bring a sense of rhythm to the images.  If I were to use a shorthand, I’d say that these paintings exist at a midpoint between representation and abstraction, the place where the reality of a painting, its particular truth, emerges for me.

I hope that this series recognizes the independence of both the plants and my imagination. So, yes, the cacti have been a thorn in my side, but in my latest visit with these living sculptures, I feel as I’ve let them speak to me and, I hope, I’ve spoken back to them.

GALACTIC STORIES

My “Galactic Stories’’ began when my daughter, an electrical engineer, sent me several photographs taken by the Hubble telescope. Intrigued, I began combing through as many astronomy books as I could find, collecting historical astronomical images and scientific charts and maps.

As friends learned about my interest, they began sending me additional books and drawings. I started using their material in collages. Not only were images and ideas juxtaposed in those collages, so were the contributions of the different people who had provided me a trove of astronomical bric-a-brac.

These “Galactic Stories” are about the interaction of ideas and materials with no clear way to separate one from the other.  I might begin with a “big” idea gleaned from whatever I understand about the amazing Hubble images and other “scientific’’ matters.

But once I begin working with paint and materials, my process takes on a life of its own as I explore the nature of paint and materials and how they interact with one another. What began as idea-oriented work becomes a process-oriented exploration.

In “Galactic Stories,’’ history, science, philosophy and art collide. Tales of gods and goddesses merge with images of nebulae many light years away. The images may not always seem like they belong together, but they’re part of an encompassing continuum.

In “Sam and Streilka,” for example, a Russian dog who traveled in space is only brush strokes away from The Big Bang. It is my hope that the painting is thematically expansive — as well as visually unified.

These paintings and their use of mixed media are not an attempt to illustrate scientific ideas and theories, but to use those ideas and theories as a springboard from which to launch my paintings and collages.

Maps and charts figure into these works, as well.

Maps chart what we think we know, yet, to me, they always suggest that there’s more to discover. In this case, that discovery involves removing what is linear and time-specific in a chart (the information) and exposing its underlying skeleton (the structure), which can become a kind of abstract expression.

The paintings and collages also may be a metaphor for the always tenuous state of what we know, the way knowledge begins, morphs and transforms into something else as we learn more.

Sometimes, a mistake can be fruitful. One day in my studio, I decided to try an experiment. I would make a painting of a black hole. I later found an image in an astronomy book that looked as if I’d copied my experimental painting from it. I’d never seen the image in that book before nor was it an image of a black hole. It was the debris disk that’s now a part of “Sam and Streilka.”

I’m not entirely sure where the line between reality and imagination begins and ends. The best I can say is that the skies are full of astonishments that can expand the field of artistic play, and those are the fields in which I’m currently working.