I draw to help me to see and remember. I paint to expand my experience. I gain personal satisfaction from making something with my hands. Drawing and painting are very spontaneous reactions to visual stimuli. Putting lines, forms and color on a surface create new realizations. The tactual experience is addictive as color and form come together to create an entity that did not previously exist. I am intrigued by doing multiple representations of the same object to explore the many different ways of expressing its essential qualities. Expressing the gesture of an object or scene is my starting point, then building on that visual structure becomes my composition.
Visualizing architectural concepts was the essence of my work as the University Architect at NC State University. Creating forms and exploring their relationships with color were the foundations of this work and now are the foundations of my paintings and drawings. Some of my forms recall building and planning arrangements. Colors conjure activities contained in the implied buildings. Visual structure, whether in teapots, water towers, or ordinary objects, presents an ongoing exploration of forms and their interrelationships. It seems as if I have always drawn and these explorations of form and color provide endless inspiration.
Mountains have always been places for lowlanders to exercise their imaginations and project their fantasies wrote Ed Douglas about the Himalaya. For the last half century I’ve looked out to the mountains from the Big House porch and captured the sights in pastel, charcoal, graphite, water colors, and, most recently, acrylics. These works focus on sky, mountains, horizon and Globe Road. The mountains become symbolically purple and the ever-present thin orange at the horizon sometimes matches the Globe Road orange. In time the weather became incorporated as an essential part of the work - rain and storms moving across the expanse and the wonderful, encompassing grey fog with a sliver of mountain blue at its base.
My friend, violist David Marschall, suggested I paint JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The mountains became music, using color, texture, and different media to reflect the sounds.