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Urban Landscapes
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| The industrial environment
paintings explore my personal experiences in the commercial manufacturing
district surrounding my Cincinnati based studio. In these compositions
I am experimenting with new brushwork bravado in a “dirty” color
palette. A variety of spatial confrontations present the viewer with
an immediate impression of the urban industrial district, replete with
litter and debris. A still-life of weeds and wood pallets punctuates
the towering cavern with dirty light-filtering panes in “CenFab
I”.
In another painting, casually collected boards next to a |
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rusting
wood burner actually are the makeshift on-street hovel called “Cecil’s
Place”, providing shelter from the heat of summer while displaying
his current salvages for sale on the roof. These are not the manicured
aprons of suburban industrial parks, where green weedless utopias
bask in bright, unclouded horizons. Surfaces of smooth, light reflecting
trailer paneling contrast sharply with broken patched brick and scrawling
graffiti. This is the blighted war zone of the inner urban, populated
with dayworkers and denizens alike.
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My paintings of cityscapes
materialize from an involvement with the geometry of architectural
form and space in the everyday urban environment of Northern Kentucky
and Greater Cincinnati. In Northern Kentucky, the subject matter
is often the residential and business architecture in the old German
neighborhoods of Mainstrasse and Peaselburg. The transient moment
of the season captured in the play of the sunlight and the setting
of the clouds will be the reason I find compelling to begin to scheme
the composition, assigning values and shapes to form and space. In
the watercolor entitled “Mother of God Church”, the double
spires of Mother of God Church loom loftily in the soft light of
autumn. The nearby drug store, Morwessel Drugs, conducts a brisk
neighborhood business across from a building with turreted interest.
I begin with a sketch on site, often in pencil and watercolor,
small in scale. The reason for this exercise is to capture in concise
brevity the initial inspiration. My objective becomes grabbing what
nuances and related details drew my imagination in the first place.
These sketches become the basis of an oil painting executed in the
studio. I have often augmented the concepts with photographs made
same day or under different circumstances. Revisiting the site often
and under different
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circumstances
triggers the original inspiration and begins the process of distillation,
a sifting of minutiae into a swirling symphonic revelation that becomes
the substance of a painting. The ability to articulate feelings
with the strokes of a brush and a combination of colors and shapes
is like being entranced by a magical symphony, even more magical
if the elements involved seem on first perception merely quotidian,
even urbane.
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