The House Of General Root Hog, 44" x 26", oil on paper, 1987. Artist's collection.

In this composition the scale has increased and obviously color becomes a factor. Using a color palette as opposed to the black and white scheme of the previous works opened the door to new challenges and discoveries in my pursuit of abstract expressionist painting. So much so that this painting is equal parts application of pigment to the surface, as well as removing (scraping off) pigment from the surface--leaving somewhat faint but highly effective "ghost" brush strokes and other passages in the composition. By now I am using fully charged four and five inch wide house painting brushes which amplifies the "commitment" issue to a very high level regarding the act of making a mark on the surface. There was a great deal more deliberation about the visual factors in this painting than in the smaller, more spontaneous, black and white compositions-- color decisions, the factor of increased scale, and this is certainly not a two-handed painting. However, one very spontaneous occurrence in the execution of this painting does guide its overall thrust. In the midst of working on this painting I felt that the central elements of the composition were beginning to fly off into the upper left corner of the picture plane. I applied a "barrier" of green paint (complementary to the red) to visually encapsulate the corner--still, didn't work. Then I flipped the brush around in my hand and with the point of the handle carved two lines in the wet green paint. This created a linear angle form which did operate as a "visual barrier", or, compositional counter-point to keep the brush strokes from implicitly flying out of the picture plane. These instinctive marks appeared to me as being the bottom corner of a pitched roof of a house and appealed to me greatly. Presenting an implicit architectural element within a purely abstract expressionist composition was an unexpected boon in terms of bringing a viable visual conceptual counter-point into the din of revelatory chaos of abstract expressionism. I believe in these last few paintings I was attempting to re-contextualize abstract expressionism for my own purposes (in a subtile way) without diminishing the visual and conceptual dynamism of abstract expressionism in its pure state.

I could speak much longer about this painting, but I should conclude here. About the title--"Root Hog" is a colloquial term for a very primitive form of the sport of wrestling. "General Root Hog" refers to the title of someone, or, a state of affairs--general "root hog."