Gallery
travel paintings
Here are mostly small-format gouaches and watercolors that I painted on various trips on the road.
El Hierro
Here you will find pictures painted on El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, during the winters of 2017-2019.
It was there that I first began to seek out materials for my painting in Nature, and to explore the limits and possibilities of this approach. I collected many different soils, which have a fairly wide range of colors on El Hierro. Simultaneously, I experimented with extracting colors from the cochineal aphid and using vegetable dyes, crushed sea shells and the “pen” (the internal shell) of squid, as the base layers for various paper and canvas grounds. Mortar and sieve became new utensils and the formats were no larger than 30 x 42 cm or 12” x 17”
El Hierro has very inspiring landscapes and life forms, especially the geological formations -including lava derived basalt- and required a more abstract approach than I had used before. The fascinating bark structure of the mighty Canary Island Pine- Pinus Canarasis- inspired me to develop a new language of forms. During lengthy stays on El Hierro my body of new work evolved from small representational watercolor landscapes, to larger format, more free, and somewhat abstracted paintings.
experimental paintings
These are my most recent paintings, created from 2019 onward. They are almost exclusively on canvas grounds and are larger format than previously used.
As begun on El Hierro, I continue to seek out most of the necessary materials and my inspiration in Nature. When useful, I also employ commercially available finished products such as acrylic paints and inks. Other components might be chalk, plaster, gypsum, mineral pitch, primers and adhesives.
Increasingly, I attempt to gracefully accept the often surprising reactions and interactions of these different materials and to let their internal natures become an integral part of a painting. This loss of control, is for me, a wondrous enrichment to the creative process.