Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
John le Carre

As a result of the cold, wet, lousy, rainy, crummy, rotten, (did I mention cold?), spring we’ve had, I’ve been able to spend a lot more guilt-free hours in the studio, side stepping that gigantic list of outdoor chores waiting to devour my time. I’ve been working on some different types of paintings, the latest work, “The Red Sailboat,” is posted above.

This painting began life as a landscape study, something I typically don’t do a lot of. I’m always fascinated by the various textures colors and reflections of a location like this: a small creek flowing through the woods on a hot summer afternoon, but usually trying to convey scenic beauty is not something that I do a lot of. It’s not that landscape paintings don’t interest me or that I don’t appreciate them, but trying to capture the beauty of a scene for its own sake just isn’t something I care to spend much time with. So even though I began the painting with a landscape painter’s mindset, at some point the illustrator in me commandeered the process, a story began to reveal itself in my mind, and the red sailboat appeared in the picture.

Why the boat is there and exactly what narrative the painting conveys is not the point of the exercise. After all this is not designed as a piece created to illuminate a particular passage as one of my book illustrations might be. Instead the idea is to provide a framework, an impetus for the viewer to create a story of their own, a Rorshach test of sorts, wide open to interpretation. We assume when we see a particular work that the artist has a reason for its creation, and as interesting as it may be to think we are catching a glimpse of the heart, mind or soul of the creator, how much more revealing is it to hear the interpretation of a work by the viewer, who comes to the party with no such preconceived notions?