I guess "concern" sounds pretentious. I am not an expert on this just thinking out loud. I haven't figured a better way to say it.
I have been interested in environmentalism for my whole life. I graduated High School in 1970. In 1968 my older friends went to Woodstock. Neil Young’s song, After the Gold Rush, a song about Mother Nature was my theme song. My parents lived across the river from Three Mile Island in Etters Pa, and I remember thinking, after the accident, I could never go home again.
I went to NY in 1970 to Art School and soon after painted with figurative artists Fairfield Porter and Paul Georges. I knew Alex Katz and Jane Freilicher, deKooning and Larry Rivers. I painted landscapes in the tradition of that time.
I had a career in NYC in the 1980’s. I also taught at UCSB, driving to CA each Spring quarter.
I painted landscapes each summer that found their way into my work at the time as big black and white abstracted landscapes. Mt St Hellens erupted at that time presenting a metaphor of angst for our place in this degrading environment, which was contained in my large chaotic works of the time.
When the 80’s art world seemed to slow in the 1990’s I began to make trips across the US to paint in many of the National Parks around the Country. Yosemite and Big Sur were my favorites.
Turtle Pt Press published a book of poetry, clouds, leaves, waves., detailing those trips.
I had a show in NYC in 1993 of big landscape paintings at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Soho. The art world was moving to
Chelsea.
I went and painted at Joshua Tree Nat Park and helped start that residence program.
In 1997 I started to stay in New Mexico and teach landscape painting in Colorado and Ca and back east in Vermont.
Ive been here in New Mexico six months of the year for ten years, I still paint in Brooklyn the other six.
So my painting has depended upon the landscape and nature. Having a show of it now I must acknowledge that debt to it especially at a troubled time as it seems.
I made a painting of the Earth for a brochure for the International Crisis Center, and later blew it up in size as a painting in my studio.
Last winter in NY there was a peace march against the war that I and my friends took part in. I am not a big activist, I feel my part is in being an artist, and in that the political edge is slight.
These events have just come upon me, including the writing of this.
Later last Spring, Philip Glass, he has been a friend of many of us downtown artists through the years. We took part in events, hosted by Tricycle Magazine, and the Garrison Institute, with other organizations. There were programs around the city-- surrounding the debut of Satya-graha at Lincoln Center of the Philip Glass opera of that name.
There was a march to Union Square, in NYC, to a sculpture of Ghandi, “be the change you want to see in the world,” was the slogan.
I made peace march type signs to represent this concern for Global Warming and the Earth.
Their message the same as my paintings have ever been.
Later there was a forum at St John the Divine, and Philip Glass played a selection from Satya Graha.
Ghandi’s Grandson spoke. He likened “ our occupation of planet earth to the British insensitive occupation of India”
Some of the paintings in my present in New Mexico at the Gerald Peters Gallery are of this theme.
Site Santa Fe, here in Santa Fe, is the representative here of the larger Art World I have always been a part of.
The value of a painting for formal worth has waned, social and political value has risen.
As these above events came up I seemed to have in some way made a relation to the more recent social and political aspect, aspects that our Site Santa Fe is apt to express. I want to be part of this concern. Though not at the expense of aesthetic interests I still hold in the forefront.
My paintings are non ironic in this aspect, but they have a more poignant poetic irony which is this severe debt to the earth we obviously depend upon. Wallace Stevens said in a poem, "death is the mother of beauty." Nature is used to this question of death.
My paintings represent another unseen irony, that of an urban citizen who coming from a region of already degraded landscape, sees doubly the value of presenting landscape in this aspect of formal beauty.
I have already in my life seen the ending of the Long Island landscape of my youth, the end of painting the pastoral landscape there. I have seen the ending of the California dream of recent memory, witness going to Yosemite on any summer week.
Santa Fe and the West, far from a retiring place seem, at least for me, seem the future of painting. A still wild place equal to the state I knew that incubated painting in my beginning years.
So we face the sublime landscape of the west wondering of its future?
My paintings try to meet the tradition of Modernist art from late Monet, Picasso and Matisse through Pollock and de Kooning.
Their nature was a given, now we stand at the edge of a necessary defense of nature.
