“Hilly Billy” consists of three series: watercolors, acrylics on canvas, and stone paintings. Each gives me a distinct platform to work from and a different approach to painting.
Watercolors
I like how they bleed. I like how integral every grain of pigment is. Sitting on the Farrandsville Bridge in July, painting as a thunderstorm rolls down the river, doesn’t suck. To make these watercolors, I go outside and simply try to record something on paper, letting my surroundings dictate the process. Sometimes I’m focused on the minutiae; other times, the work is 90% internal, and the landscape is only the scaffold that props the painting up. I am always amazed by the miracle of walking into the woods or sitting in a stream with a blank sheet of white paper and, within a couple of hours, watching a painting emerge into the world out of nothing.
Large acrylics on canvas
These paintings are made in the studio over longer stretches of time than the watercolors. As much as I love the bleeding of color, I also love crisp edges. The two large canvases in this show grew directly from the view outside my second-floor studio windows in the woods. I am eye level with the trees, watching as much unfolding in the canopy and sky as on the ground below. This visual vocabulary has been growing and evolving for many years.
Stone paintings
I love things that are tight and streamlined, but these times seem to cry out for things that are clunky and chunky. Maybe it is an unconscious reaction to the synthetic feel of AI. Can AI play or experience joy? I don’t think so.
I have played with stones and found objects since the late 1990s, but this new series truly feels revelatory: a pushback against some kind of external noise I can’t quite explain. Created with stones, sand, and found objects, these pieces embrace a freedom and unpredictability that I find refreshing and fun. All these works pour out of the same faucet. I try to harness, or perhaps gently corral, what is coming out and then get out of the way.