I began to see the figure in the abstract field and drew it out. I started to use a brush...

The methods of art study where I went to school varied. But the pervading stylistic means taken by the serious students was Abstract Expressionism and a form of expressionistic figuration from a movement in the area called West Coast Funk. There was a strong history of abstract and figurative art in the region. "A whole school of figurative art spanning 1950-1965 is well documented. It was called Bay Area Figurative. The figurative art mainline was engendered by David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and James Weeks. Theophelus Brown, Paul Wonner and Nathan Oliveira bridged to the second generation of Manuel Neri, Bruce McGaw and Joan Brown" [Bay Area Figurative Art, Caroline A Jones, 1990]. The middle 60's through the middle 70's saw a group including H.C. Westerman, William Wiley, Roy Deforest, Robert Arneson, David Gilhooly and Clayton Baily as exponents of the West Coast Funk style. Most of these people taught art at the Universities around Northern California...

While I began painting the figure, I was also painting abstractions. I had 2 painting styles going at once for a time. It would be a couple of years before they would converge completely. The abstract paintings had evolved into an expressionistic pattern style. It was based predominately on the width of a brush and the size of the hole in a tube of paint....

The Early Renaissance had inspirations for me...

Knocked on his door
I’d like to erase one of your drawings
He said he wasn’t going to make it easy for me

And he didn’t

Spent 4 weeks erasing that drawing
15 different types of erasers
And
there’s a drawing on the other side...

The Union Gallery has, at its center, a massive 3 level glass case with a ramp running round the right side, up the back, rising to the top level on the left and stairs descending back down to the ground floor of the gallery.

This Site-Specific Installation has conceptual roots in the work of Joseph Beuys and Christian Boltanski. Joseph Beuys developed installation imagery and objects based on the historical memory of his past. He mined his own living experience for the tools of his work. Following that lead, Christian Boltanski archeologically unearthed his past back to his childhood to find images and objects to work with.

I found a vintage photograph of my grandfather with his 10 brothers and 1 sister. I formed the installation around the concept of ascending the ancestral past through the physical aspects of the gallery itself.

From the darkness and dirt-ground origin and base form carbon,
through the blood of mankind, I ascend the past to meet the
ancestors within the highest form diamond in the light.

From the darkness (black floor)
and dirt-ground origin (rock and dirt pile)
and base form carbon (graphite mixed with linseed oil painted on the lower skirting)
through the blood of mankind (underpainting black with red painted walls and the glass case covered inside with matte ascetate and red lightbulbs diffusing through the matte ascetate),
I ascend the past to meet the ancestors within the highest form diamond (a photograph placed within a diamond shape - the diamond being the highest developed form of carbon)
in the light (gallery lighting and white ceiling).

Also, in collaboration with the sound artist Earl Moeller, was a sound collage. It began with low bass sounds rising to high alto looped and played in the background for the duration of the installation.

I enjoy conceiving installation concepts. But to implement them ends in my waiting to finish the construction so I can get back to painting. There is pure unadulterated sensual pleasure in painting. There is no mind. When I think about it, I realize that painting is direct contact with the process of creativity. It is a vital state. Conceiving ideas, concepts are a part of the vital state. It is when the direct contact with creativity ends, that the waiting begins. The vital is gone. Construction after the conception is a state of waiting. For me to continue with Installation and Site-Specific work, I would have to experience something I realize intellectually but do not actually, the continuous vital state in the mundane, in the construction.

I can see Performance Art is direct contact with creativity. With that in mind, I see the very act of breathing and walking as a form of Performance Art. Every man and woman and child is in a state of creativity. All are in their "Performance". It is really just a matter of consciousness of that fact. I know mentally the construction of an installation is part of the creative act in its "Performance" state, but I do not actually experience it while building a piece. Saying it is simple. Doing it is not simple. I have to be empty of thinking for it to take place...