Artist’s Statement

I began working figuratively as a graduate student at Yale University School of Art. I arrived a staunch practitioner of abstract painting. In my second year, abstraction lost its challenge for me. I found it in figurative work. Some instructors were negative; Josef Albers encouraged me.

I studied my masters, Hals, Manet, Zurbaran, Whistler and Eakins and painted my first full-length portrait in 1961. Years later the challenge still drives me. I still paint people.

Pre-college I made a choice to become a painter rather than a writer, but my interest in personality and character remained. Thus I combine a writer’s sensibility with painterly concerns. I have studied faces, bodies, their subtle coloring and how people’s lives, young or old, are reflected in their physical presence. The palette of each painting grows out of the study of the poser’s character. In my double, triple and quadruple portraits, the subject is portrayed in different moods – as I have done in numerous self-portraits.

During the work process, through intense looking, drawing, painting, I crawl inside the subject’s head, coming as close to knowing the person as a psychoanalyst can.

In recent years I have been painting portraits of family members, loosely based on old photographs. This is an extraordinary experience in painting, as well as emotionally. It may have roots in my reading Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” over four decades. Or my desire to know these people as they were at an earlier time.