Politick, 24" x 32", acrylic on canvas, 1989. Artist's collection.

This surreal black and white composition began as a two-handed, non-objective, abstract expressionist painting which also incorporated a grid-matrix system. It did not work--the disparate approaches canceled each other out. I then painted over the entire surface with black paint. While studying the light reflecting off of the topography of the underlying brushwork I spotted a rough allusion to the face and shoulder of a figure. I carefully rendered the fragments of the form with white paint. I painted only the parts that I had seen--the side of the face, the neck, and the shoulder. Next, using a dry-brush technique, I painted the glowing light area at the left to faintly suggest a landscape element in which the figure might exist. It worked in terms of contextualizing the space of the picture as a landscape, but the figure appeared to be emerging out of the surface of the earth. Not bad. I needed another element to contextualize this curious state of events so I added another form which naturally emerges from the earth, a tree. I added the evergreen tree form at the horizon half way between the figure and the left edge of the canvas. Twenty-five trees later, plus one moon, and a winged creature flying off the top right corner of the canvas, the painting had arrived. Some of the trees are simply trees, others are lighter-than-air forms, or, are they rockets, or, missiles? One of the trees is a thought in the figure's mind. Seven of the trees are memories. I don't mean to come-off as sounding cryptic, but I think I have explained too much already, or, perhaps just enough.