Less than two weeks before my exhibition at Yumart (which opens the afternoon of the 26th)…..and two of my paintings still have wet paint happening. Yikes! I’m expecting they’ll both have enough skin for safety, but there’s impasto aplenty going on in both of them and it’s going to take a while before they are dry through and through.

There have been times when I’ve worked in acrylics. Curiously, I tend to work thin when I use acrylics. I know of a number of painters who are much more successful than I am at handling the somewhat unforgiving texture of acrylic paint when applied thickly. With acrylics I’ll often have a brush in one hand and a spray bottle in the other and let water become a painting tool. This causes drips and it makes the paint matte, both qualities I like to work with.

You can see that with this painting, The Source, which I did a number of years ago. I think I did three tondos in the same vein, featuring foggy, obscured images. Those paintings still resonate with me, although I may be alone in that assessment.

Although acrylic paint has its charms for me, oil paint offers up more range. It dries slowly (unless you add stuff to it to accelerate that action) and various stages of drying each offer their own painterly possibilities. It seems that the smaller the painting, the more impasto I pile on. They may be small objects but I try to make the most of the scale. Some of my larger oil paintings are not so thick.

Here is one from the mid-90s called Shack Nasty. This one hangs in the home of my friends Jill and Scott. I painted it with oil paint with some spray enamel on canvas. This painting is maybe 6′ X 4′, something like that. It was exhibited in the c.1996 exhibition, one of a number of large-scale group exhibitions we cooked up over the years.

The paint treatment in Back Woods, one of the new paintings, is more typical of the images you’ll see in the upcoming Paintings from the Lost Forest exhibition at Yumart. This one is just 12″X9″, a small but intense painting. It was built up over a period of years. At times it was abandoned in the studio, trapped in some dead end or another and later righted, re-imagined, pushed back on track. I’ve learned to be patient with my paintings.