Body Portraits
These ⇒portraits were painted on unprimed cheese-cloth, which was stretched on an upright, free-standing wooden frame two meters high by one and a half meters wide. (The setup was introduced to me by the painter and performance artist Barbara Heinisch in one of her painting workshops.) I stood on one side of the frame with my subject on the other, pressed right up against the semi-transparent fabric. The subject was usually naked. At a certain point during the process the person whose portrait I was painting was no longer necessary on the other side of the frame; he or she could now observe and play a consultative role in the process.
The process was one of discovery: that is, I had no idea what my painterly response would be to the physical and energetic presence of my subject or what kind of overall image would emerge that represented him or her in some way.
The last stage of the process: the painting was removed from its original frame and then stretched on one with primed canvas as a backing.
Other Work
Animals — or shapes suggestive of animals — had a tendency to show up in my paintings. Here are ⇒ some examples, along with samples of other work.
