"Fifteen Windows (Paris)," 2025
A new small Paris painting
I’m flying home to California tomorrow and I managed to finish this painting today in the apartment I share with my son in the 11th arrondissement. I use his apartment as a studio when he’s at work. I travel with pairs of same size canvases so I can pack them face to face in my suitcase for safe travel. They can even be a little wet when I tape them together since I don’t usually paint very thick when I’m traveling. Yesterday I was in the Saint Georges metro in the early afternoon when Paris can be very still and I’m sure that the feeling of the quiet metro had a lot to do with my ability to finish this painting today.
Many of the metro stations are poorly lit with energy saving lighting but Saint Georges was glowing and mysterious yesterday. It’s many decades now that I’ve been coming to Paris, mostly to visit the museums and study Corot, Leger, Matisse and Chardin up-close, in person. Increasingly I come to Paris to get ideas for paintings and I myself am astonished by how much this city is inspiring new work. I enjoy the challenge to push towards something realistic, identifiable, while insisting on a resolution point that is determined by the collection of colors and shapes.
In just three days my San Francisco exhibit of large paintings will open at 425 Market Street. The show titled, Giant Paintings from New England, California and Newfoundland, will be on view March 17-May 30, 2025 in the two galleries of a San Francisco skyscraper’s lobby. You can view the exhibit 24/7. Donald Kuspit has written a new review of the large paintings in Whitehot Magazine. He writes about the impact of Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi on my work. He says some very accurate things about how I and other phenomenologists use the act of painting to explore the relationship between the interior emotional world and the objective visual external world. That’s definitely what interests me in painting and it’s what a good color course brings to light. Perception isn’t automatic or definitive; it’s internal - it’s your brain making sense of the world and your surroundings. Who knows if anyone else is experiencing it in the same way we do. If you’ve read Josef Albers book, Interaction of Color, you’re aware that that is the emphasis of what he is teaching in both his writing and painting-that all of perception is personal and contextual. Appreciating that reality opens endless possibilities for deeper experiences of observation.
Here is a Bonavista, Newfoundland painting from a few years ago that is related to the Fifteen Windows painting. Fifteen Windows came from an observed sunrise moment, Bonavista from an observed sunset moment.
At one point, I was introducing large flat blocks of color into my landscapes in order to change the context of the colors in a painting that I wanted to be more mysterious or active or less active. Now I am more likely to find a situation that has the collection of shapes and colors that I want to work with and invention is likely. But don’t misunderstand that I am simply reporting on what I saw. The world is turned into a painting by embracing the limitations of oil paint and a two dimensional surface and this isn’t done by convention but by editing and combining the colors that speak to the experience of looking.
Here’s an earlier painting with those blocks of color, Montisi, 2001-2005. It’s in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna in Rome.
When I delivered this painting to the GNAM museum in Rome in 2018, this Albers was waiting to greet us.
I’m still thinking about the color class I taught in Meyreuil two weeks ago. It really challenged me and pushed me and I’m grateful to have been invited.
NEWS
“Giant Paintings from New England, California and Newfoundland” will be on view at 425 Market Street in San Francisco, March 17-May, 30, 2025.
Upcoming exhibition “Small Paintings” at Galerie Mercier, Paris, May 20-24, 2025.
Click here to see all of the new notecards including Paris, San Francisco, Amalfi, Newfoundland, Race Point, North Truro, Maine.
Notecards are also available in person at Explore Books in Vail, Keplers Books in Menlo Park, Provincetown Art Association and Museum and SFMOMA.
The late great French poet Philippe Jacottet has a nice little book on his friend Giorgio Morandi entitled The Pilgrim’s Bowl, which may interest you.
I’m a MA native but live SF and have spent time in Newfoundland (Gros Morne). I spend time in the Rangeley Lakes in Maine too w /my girlfriend-partner’s family.
I enjoy yr work.
I was good friends with Etel Adnan—do you know her work?
Best