Current Shows

"he who pays the piper calls the tune"
showing at the Grit in Athens, GA

the paintings in this show were completed between it's hard for me to date them so i won't. they take longer than they should, which is possibly the cause as well as the effect of working on so many paintings in an endless daisy chain, which is not efficient and probably not shrewd or even smart, and if i knew any other way to work i might work i might do just that.

some of them have traveled to saint albans, vermont and back to athens, only to be dragged to charlottesville virginia and back to athens as i have zigzagged, wandered, lived and painted over the years. they are old friends to me. some of them began fairly recently. some,such as one called crepuscule, my -nth carousel painting and we're an american band which found me dilletanting around with cubism, were completed this month.

they may seem like a random topsy turvy hodgepodge, but they are woven somewhat snugly into the fabric of subject matter i have dealt with and continue to handle.

the title of the show(also used for for one of the paintings) was pinched from a quote i read from antonin scalia about government funding for art, something i have mixed feelings about. the painting i used the title for is of a military marching band. i love marching bands and i thought they would make a good subject to sink my teeth into. the painting entitled 'the fourth' is of a barbershop quartet. i painted it while i was in vermont, around 2004. there's a whiff of capricious reverence there. i had discovered the early recordings of the mills brothers and was listening to them a lot, and it crossed my mind that a modern day barbershop quartet as a nostalgia act by some seedy little old men might be a snarky comment on a certain brand of patriotism. i consider myself a patriotic american, and am very much concerned with being an american artist. i just happen to be a wee bit cantankerous. like vonnegut, i believe that people mistake hopeful disappointment for cynicism. i took a shot at ambivalence with this one. these guys look like the might be harmless fun at a wedding, or a fourth of july picnic if they don't imbibe too much and walk around pinching women's bottoms and such. i'm proud of the action between the man snatching the other one's hat off. i made the victim of the hat snatching to look like my father, as a tip of the cap so to speak. my father doesn't seem to think he looks like the man in the picture.

i like carnivals and fairs because of the mischief, the innocence, the showmanship, the enterprise, etc. it's a very rich subject matter. i could go on for paragraphs. i'm trying not to.

dean benedetti was an amateur saxaphone player and the subject of much folklore among jazz buffs. a buff is a more genteel term for an egghead, which is what i am, more or less. benedetti followed charlie parker around at his live shows with a cheap microphone and tape machine in the 40's and recorded his solos, just his solos. he shut the mic off when other musicians played. unfortunately benedetti followed the path a lot of sycophantic jazz musicians staggered, believing heroin could help him play like charlie parker and he died under poor health at 34. his family found his recordings of parkers solos and they have become something of the Dead Sea Scrolls of jazz. i've never looked for a picture of benedetti, probably won't. i enjoyed imagining as younger than he probably actually was, in an ill-fitting suit, maybe a Newsie cap, sitting in a sparse room with his phonograph, trying to figure out just how in the hell Bird did what he did. it's a very empathetic painting. i've painted the subject several times and one of those paintings is on the wall in this show. i have included some paintings in this show involving the process of improvising on themes i have explored innumerable times, much in the same way a musician tries to take a tired old standard melody and shake up a little stardust into it.