Selected Paintings and Drawings 

Professors
William Allik
Lyme Old Lyme High School
Michael Peery
Private Instruction
Pola Wickham
Cornell in Rome

Representational Art was and continues to be the foundation to my understanding of design. Observing, without judgement, and translating to two-dimensional space forces one to think in new ways. It is a process of examining the familiar and deconstructing it to be purely visual form - shapes, lines, color. The senses become heightened to relational and visual thinking - alignment, scale, proportion.

In a broader sense, it is about breaking down our mental perceptions of what we think something ‘looks like’ and learning to build a new perception based solely on what we see in the moment. The final painting or drawing is more of an afterthought, a biproduct of this meditative process. It is not about what the work looks like in the end; it is about a practiced state of being: observing and absorbing.

The selection of artwork included here spans more than a decade. The mediums vary including charcoal, graphite, oil paint. Some of the work reflects dozens of hours of refinement; others are quick studies in an hour or less. 

Drawing is more abstract than painting. In drawing, everything must be distilled to lines and planes, light and dark. With the abstraction, comes an imposed precision of craft. Lines are straight, constructed perspectives are more pronounced. In the absence of color, light is more pronounced. Light makes drawings feel real. 

Painting is more freeing than drawing. Brush strokes are never perfectly straight. Rather than being a process of addition and subtraction, painting is a continuous evolution. Paint is pushed and pulled; it develops into mountains and valleys on the canvas. Finally, the color is very powerful. It deepens the emotions.