An Introduction - The Artist Critic

From an early age I have been an artist. My father, his mother and his sisters were a creative bunch who had the attention of my ears and eyes from the beginning. When I was 8 years old my grandmother spray painted her fading linoleum floor to look like clouds of blue and pink. My Mind was blown that she could get away with such a thing. At 10 my aunt painted large red dots across the entirety of her kitchen walls in an era when Yayoi Kusama wasn’t known to Aunties in Ohio.

My more conservative father filled our small house with smells of paint, linseed oil and turpentine. He schooled me and my brothers on perspective and observation. He enlightened us that tree trunks weren’t just black or brown and skies weren’t just blue. Both he and my mother were avid readers in a day that brought us stacks of periodicals that would bring the outside world, for good and for ill, into our home. The graphics and the photography in those 60’s era periodicals were extraordinary and would surely excite my eyes as much as my brain.

In these and other early experiences I began to sort and curate my visual world. I came to codifying visual experiences whether it was regarding the course of a streetscape, a building face, a room layout, or the choices an artist would make for a painting on a wall. I was a painter and would come to a career designing dwellings. But always those inner voices were critiquing, judging, and sorting a point of view. I would often be compelled to voice an opinion which may or may not land like a lead balloon. I feel sometimes I will burst if I can’t get my thoughts out there so another can either be enlightened by my brilliance, or more often, describe my error and lead me to another path.

On these pages, in this BLOG, I hope to share my thoughts as I move about in my small corner of an artful world.