Forty-eight years of commercial work served to round my skills at rendering the visual world. Even as a student, however, I was more fascinated with the intuitive suggestion inherent in abstract painting. I sensed the deeper need for non-literal expression. For over 50 years, I’ve tried to bypass the usual process of pleasing the eye and the mind—a literal portrayal. I try to short-circuit directly from the Intuitive. The resulting images I might call “Impulse Splashes”. They come from the unconscious. Their best expression, for me, though, is incomplete without visual parameters—controls from the conscious mind, such as defined shapes and edges and hence the calligraphic shapes and pin-striping. So my effort at the ultimate visual expression requires the balance of the conscious and the unconscious—the mental and the intuitive.
I want to transcend this literal morass.
I don’t want to do a painting that LOOKS like something.
I want it to BE something.