I have no style either. And that is completely deliberate. In fact this is the
standard that I have always held myself to my entire life. I have tried to be true to
myself by avoiding any art style that, for me, seems contrived. Maybe it has something to do with my last name, or because I grew up in a small Oregon town.
But as I made my way through life and high school I gathered what basic instruction and lessons that I could from every art teacher I had.
In college, I developed my figure drawing skills and did my best to better
my understanding of painting. I also dove deeply into art history and kept track of
modern art as I still do today.
At the University of Oregon I was exposed to a lot of cultural art. I under-
stood that there was a wide variety of artistic cultural expressions, none of which
had anything to do with me. As a pretty good illustrator I could choose to push
my work into neorealism, but that too seemed contrived and competing with photography, and neorealism is often photo derived work.
I find that photo assisted work tends to flatten the perspective and the subject.
It also changes the way we see the scene, reducing the moment to a shutter click.
Working plein air gives me the full observation of the scene. Direct observation
and light give me truer contrast, color, and focus. It changes from a moment in
time, to a full portrait of the scene and the people.
There is thin description of an artist, and there is thick description of an artist.
It is the difference between traditionalism and conservatism. In my painting style,
I am not working in a tradition, I am painting conservatively as that best describes
who I am as an artist. I’m just a guy from a small town in Oregon, so I paint like
that. But what subject I choose to paint is the more important story.
I paint the story of us. I see the world we have created to live in. We make
our neighborhoods into the Gardens of Eden that we want them to be. I am a
neighborhood artist. I work in public and engage with passers by while painting. I
still live in a very small town of about 2000 people so my bicycle art studio set up
on a sidewalk makes me a character in the community. That is also deliberate.
But then I don’t create the kind of compositions that the art market wants.
My paintings aren’t modern expressionism, nor are they impressionistic landscapes of ethereal beauty. They don’t have the appeal of lobby art, and they will not likely ever be worth a corporate tax write off. But together, they tell the story of us, how we see and interact with our world and each other.
