“In 2007, I presented a 50-piece exhibit of my artwork at The Works: Ohio Center for History, Art & Technology in Newark, OH. It was titled ‘Routes | Roots’ referring to the route between New York, my assimilated home, and mid-Ohio where I was born. The road provides a multitude of constantly-changing subject matter, patterns in the landscape, and moods. Small sketches made while traveling on these many trips can be an end in themselves; or they can, like note-taking, serve as reference in the studio later on.
“I’ve always been attracted to the landscape of fields and farms so familiar to me as I grew up east of Columbus on old Route 40. Living in Manhattan for many years without this landscape led to paintings like ‘Looking for Ohio’. It was created in the midst of grey concrete. With an overwhelming urge to experience the greens of the fields, my painting seemed to pour out onto the canvas.
“The acquisition of my upstate home and studio afforded me, once again, to experience the natural landscape. Just outside my studio windows is a large cornfield that has given me much pleasure to document through the seasons.”
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“Routes | Roots was the first show opening of mine my father was able to attend and we were featured in a large article in that Sunday’s Columbus Dispatch. As a sixth generation resident of the town, it made him very happy.”
CANAL IMPRESSIONS
“I first decided to use the canal as subject matter when I was searching for a site—some particular part of my background—to revisit and paint my impressions of. The section of the Ohio & Erie Canal just south of Hebron was an integral part of my childhood. My father, as a sixth-generation Hebronite, had endless stories of his years growing up there and of the history of the canal itself. My own friends and I had many a winter skating party on the smooth, flat ice.
“On visits to the canal in different seasons and different light, I began to take stock of the visual components on this stretch: the long, flat horizontalness dissected by vertical trees that spurt straight up from shallow ground; the colors, however subtle—rust, yellows, greys, lavenders; its banks and their differences; the water’s movement and reflections; the immersion of limbs bending and intertwining that mingle, tangle and mesh into thickets and then reach out gracefully to extend over the water. And I thought about the purpose of the canal as a means of conveyance: a road, a highway, a passage, a route.”
“The opening occurred on my birthday and it was wonderful to reconnect with many friends, several of whom are collectors: Richard Weidner with “Canal Mystery”.”
“‘Spring Canal’ was exhibited there again in 2016 when it became part of the permanent collection of The Works: Ohio Center for History, Art & Technology, Newark, OH.”
