Color, Abstraction, and Emotion

The CSPS Main Gallery shows my recent abstract oil paintings. These artworks explore shape, color, scale, and positive and negative space. Viewing these artworks allows people to experience color and composition and respond to each artwork with their own emotions and feelings. These artworks are open to viewer interpretation and there is no one “right” way to see them.

The Club Room Gallery features works on paper that show how I have developed abstract concepts over decades. I’ve gone back and forth between series with imagery and series with abstract compositions several times. I did hard-edge collages in the 1980s. I made abstract watercolors in the early 2000s. My current work uses motifs from those earlier works to create more spontaneous collage compositions.

During the years of the Covid pandemic, I worked on a 312-page graphic novel with writing partner Fritz McDonald. The Commons Gallery displays in-progress drawings and digitally finished pages of this book as well as large collages using high resolution images created for the graphic novel. The largest of these collages, created after the book was finished and printed on aluminum, is eight feet by 16 feet.

Some people wonder why I’ve switched back and forth between artworks with imagery and abstract artworks. My main reason is that I see my artwork as a response to the state of American society at different times. In 2007 I had a solo show at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, IA titled Iowa Pastimes: Politics and State Fairs. This work was inspired by my observations of so-called “news” coverage of politics and personal observations at our Iowa State Fair. As Michelle Robinson, then Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Figge wrote, “Both share crowds of people, over-the-top marketing, and a sensory overload.” American narratives were important in my work then and continue to be important. By 2015 I was very disappointed in the state of American culture. I asked myself, what will America look like in 150 years if current trends continue? The result was a six-year project resulting in the graphic novel 2184 1/2. Today society is spinning even faster and being pulled apart in segmented directions. My current series of abstract collage-based work is my response to the question “What does society need now?”