Artist’s Statement
A deer once roamed the wilds of Wyoming and succumbed to a hunter. His magnificent mounted head found its way into my hands on Peaks Island, ME, and from there he traveled to Louisville, KY. I painted his portrait in the context of my studio where I chose a background of a few architectural fragments to float ambiguously among an imagined landscape.
Inspired by Renaissance painting at the time, I decided to paint a male figure standing in the doorway to my porch, at the threshold of what I could see from my Baltimore studio and porch windows. Multiple views of the park, expressway configurations, and urban dwellings observed during all four seasons in various conditions of light and weather inspired me to shift sharply from realistic space. What at first was to be an interior/exterior setting evolved into an ambiguous placement of figure, architecture, and the natural world.
While in the Catskill Mountains one summer, I suddenly needed a break from painting all the green bucolic landscape and found relief in farm architecture dressed in a series of grays. I observed the arrangement of curves and rectangles huddled together in the hot sun that beat down on the metal roofing—a refuge for the herd of cows soon to enter for milking time. I set up my painting gear just outside the fence line.