Callen McJunkin Gallery

Abstraction has been latent in my paintings for a long time. An art-historian friend once told me that my landscape paintings looked as if they were done by an abstract painter who went outside!

This stylistic change in my paintings, a renewal really, was begun directly after my second trip to Japan, around New Year's 1996. While there my wife and I toured Zen temples in Kyoto, including Ryoan-ji with its famous raked gravel rock garden. I've always felt close to a certain Japanese aesthetic, a kind of formal simplicity. Soon after returning to the States, I had a rare, clear, dream, (in color), of a painting. It was so vivid and convincing that I quickly set out to do the work. This was the beginning of my "adventure".

At times there have been particular correspondences in the natural, phenomenal, physical world to what I hope for in a painting. One such time was when I was walking in the loft space of our big, old barn. Early morning sunlight was flooding the interior below. As I glanced down the light was bursting through this slits between the floor boards making brilliant crevices of light, -- a metaphor, perhaps, for some sort of transcendent, otherworldly, awakening.

*Recipient of a 2004 Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY