About Baroque Confidential:  the Secret Life of Middle C   

My musical and visual worlds have merged for a stop, look and "listen" series. Mixing media makes it easier to experiment with the traditions of art and music. I am using the lines, spaces and symbols of musical notation to build a visual vocabulary. With these black and white "words", I am painting a character portrait of sound before it dies away.

I want you to see the unique sound created by the composer on the page and the personality of that sound created by the musical artist in performance. I want to depict the individuality of that sound beyond what the mere memory of pitch allows. My work attempts to interpret the singular "look and feel" of a particular sound from the space it takes graphically in the music score to the space it takes on the keyboard while it's being produced. I hope that now you can see the "body language" of sound as a musician might see and feel it.
 

About Molten Dreams

     •  Monoclines

One summer I saw both Frank Gehry's Disney Concert hall in Los Angeles and Arches National Park, including the arch that has recently collapsed. I wanted to paint the shape and volume of those man-made suspended steel waves and Nature's red rock sculptures to hang on a wall. So I draped canvas over wired shapes and painted layered, mixed media abstract landscapes.

 •  Dreams Up in Smoke

These are small "portraits" of blackened and rusted metal and roasted bits of wood, objects found along a lonely country lane near the railroad tracks, an eerie place more like a deserted planet. I rescued these objects and gave them a second chance as purely colors, textures, and shapes. Later I learned the story. An arsonist had torched a warehouse and the fire department didn't get there in time. My sister knew the young couple who had lost it all: business inventory, Christmas decorations, and the family's winter clothes.

About Men in Hats

Men are fascinating when they choose to wear a hat. My dad never left the house without one. These portraits get their special edge from the panache and confidence of the men wearing the hats.  Nowadays, other than baseball caps, men rarely choose to wear a distinctive head covering. For those who do choose a hat with a particular shape and shadow, they add a sense of romance to their face and character without saying a word.