The subject matter that continues to fascinate me is the figure in the landscape.
I began to deal seriously with this subject in 1995, at the start of my MFA thesis project, at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
My passion has always been art and politics, but until that time, I had never made significant social comment with my work; it had primarily been confined to activism and organizing around issues like war and environmental degradation. I was part of a core group of activists in the early 80's creating some of the first Nuclear Free Zones in California. In the mid 80's, I participated in the Shadow Project to commemorate the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were literally vaporized near ground zero, leaving only shadows where a body had once existed. And I was very active organizing and creating educational forums to oppose the Gulf War in 1991.
But it was not until the formation of my thesis project that it became obvious to me that my work had to become meaningful on more levels. At the same time I had begun to study Sacred Geometry with a professor at the Academy. This added another dimension to my work that had long been an enjoyable interest: geometry and math.
And so the natural convergence of oil painting, social comment, the desire to teach, and geometry began to evolve into a Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition in the fall of 1997. It was entitled "Home Street Home", attended by the Mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, and raised almost $1500 for the Coalition on Homelessness, to whom I donated 10% of sales.
Homelessness continued to be my focus and was the subject of ongoing exploration in a curated two person show the following year at the Atrium Gallery entitled "Home Front", which included my work and that of another artist whose images were domestic scenes. It was positively reviewed and lead to my worked being represented by Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, where I continued to show urban landscapes, with and without figurative elements, using dynamic symmetry as a compositional tool, utilizing ratios like the Golden Section, the square roots of 2, 3 and 5, as well as the square, and composites of these rectangles.
I continue to find urban subject matter compelling, especially night scenes that are not routinely painted, like construction scenes and the workers involved, the changing aspects of neighborhoods in transition, including buildings destined for demolition or alteration, and the industrial waterfront areas that accompany many large cities like San Francisco.
In my recent work, the consequences of our economic/environmental policies has crept back into my work, as my focus has turned to oil tankers in distress (" Death of an Oil Tanker: Prestige 1976-2002 ") and the imagery of big ships. The series entitled Import/Export included cargo ships, which became the focus of political dissent in the spring of 2003, when the ILWU strikes at the Oakland container shipyards attracted national attention over the issues of peaceful protest and domestic security.
