People always ask me “What do you paint”? One painter asked me “What concepts are you interested in”? Another, “Are you an Impressionist”? I really hate labels. I do like being called a “wild beast” which is what they called the Fauvists. And I do use” jarring textures, color, crowded space to heighten emotional intensity” like the Expressionists. But I really think I am a Contemporary American Painter.

Here is a good example of the “wild beast” aspect of my painting: Every year we go to Sanibel Island where my painter wife Mary picks up beautiful, whole, perfect sea shells and lovingly categorizes them, photographs them and takes them home with us. I pick up broken shell fragments, sea weed, dead crabs shells, bone fragments from the sea, Lighting Whelk casings (now there’s a miracle) and stuff that just plain smells bad – like dead fish. I photograph it all for future reference. That and combinations thereof is what I paint – complete with sand from the shore in the paint.

The poet Gerald Stern has been called “the poet of exile, ruins and redemption “laying claim to people/places/things that other people have abandoned and investing them with new value through his incandescent imagination”. I like that: that is how I paint.

As a Contemporary American Painter my paintings explore human beings, places, structures and found object’s relationship to the past and the future, and incorporate the concept of life, worth, DNA, death, and now.