Before Realizing What I Was Doing

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The Roof, oil on canvas, 20 x 14 inches, 1980.


Sitting at our dining room table yesterday my wife looked up and remarked about three of the four oils I had just hung on walls. "They're all pictures of home" she exclaimed. This hadn't been my plan, I just pulled out canvases that I felt like looking at.

Truro Kitchen, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches, 2018.



But I had to admit she was right. Without realizing it I had selected paintings of houses I'd like to live in. Places where I'd feel safe. In this time of a frightening virus, my unconscious was guiding my selections. In Truro Kitchen above the painting shows the tiny kitchen Edward Hopper designed for himself on Cape Cod. In the morning sunlight it's amazingly cozy- the kind of place we'd all like to be just now.



Houses on the Hill II, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 niches, 2020



We carry with us through our adult lives a sense of "how things are supposed to be" that forms in our childhood. I grew up in a house half way up a steep hillside. In Houses on the Hill II the backyards of these two houses near my studio in Baltimore have that same feeling. On a gut level I know I'd like to live there.

 Whenever you feel a special connection to a painting I've always said your are discovering a part of yourself in it. This is just another example of my own paintings showing me what I've been feeling.

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