Born: New Bedford, MA
Raised: Mattapoisett, MA
High School: Old Rochester Regional High School
College or University: Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD – BFA in Painting (cum laude)
Now living and working in: Mattapoisett and New Bedford, MA
Representative Agency: Breslin Fine Art Gallery, E. Greenwich, RI
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is about intersections - often, the intersections of opposites or distinct differences: the divine with the human; “darkness and light”; the ancient with the modern; abstract and modern painting concerns with early representational/narrative painting concerns. I think the combinations, ironies, and juxtapositions are what and where we live.
My paintings for the last decade have been inspired by both religious icon paintings of the early Christian, Byzantine, and Middle Ages, and my love of modern painting concerns. The aesthetics and intentions of these icons - interactions between two-dimensional design/decoration, and stylized representational/narrative painting, the symbology, and the devotion to God in the act of painting practiced by these artists - intrigues, delights, and resonates with me.
Born: New Bedford, MA
Raised: New Bedford, MA
High School: New Bedford High School
College or University: attended University of Massachusetts Amherst
and UMassDartmouth
Now living and working in:
South Dartmouth, MA
Representative Agency:
Adam Baumgold, New York, NY; Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY
ARTIST STATEMENT
Painting: Now this is a messy business. All these concepts, metaphors, symbols - they just don’t seem to stick. Oily annoyances, they always end up contaminating an otherwise clean surface before sliding off and befouling the studio floor. They form doubts, disregard rules they insisted on moments on before, and then they’re gone. Busy little bees buzzing from flower to flower, cross-pollinating and hybridizing, they’re never satisfied. The dead end becomes all too apparent and attractive. Anyway, it’s out of my hands, so hey - if you cant beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Pardon me sir, may I interest you in a scenic landscape?
So here I am with a smile on my face and a tear in my eye. All I ever really wanted was a style, just one, that’s all... I’ve already told you that if you were a good boy you could have dessert. But you haven’t been good at all. You don’t know how to pay attention or focus. Now stop playing with your food or you’ll eat it for breakfast tomorrow! Can’t you finish anything? Must be attention deficit disorder... When you fail to recognize your own limitations failure becomes a method and dissonance your spirit guide. Maybe the dead end isn’t what it seemed. It’s the point where the road ends and ubiquity begins. Recall the ambassadors! Forward in all directions! Now take this down: I’ve confused desire with attraction - I want more. I demand more. I’m coming to take what’s mine! In a constant state of arousal a sense of accomplishment is elusive, but at least now you can admit one thing - a parochial attitude is no longer possible. Ah yes, the non-hierarchical aesthetic has become paradigm.
Don’t provoke me, I’ll paint your portrait!
Or maybe I won’t. And that’s the ironic ending. Now the childhood fantasy has come true. Bombardment with gamma rays or the experiment gone terribly awry has forced you to assume multiple identities. Armed with ambiguity, disparity, and a hint of resolve, the assimilation of diverse pictorial modes begins.
Look how this still life adds to any arrangement!
The challenge to painting’s flexibility is deliberate and deadly serious. Strict informality meets ornament toe to toe on the uneven playground of gothic hyperspace. An intentional mistake whispers noncompliance but can stop indecision dead in its tracks from becoming paralysis. So what’s the big idea with this anything goes anti-strategy? The fact that there is no big idea is the big idea.
It’s all just a means to an end. The surface describes only that which is superficial and immaterial - merely camouflage given shape by a totally different underlying structure. What does the text mean? Not what it says. You’ve taken me too literally. I’m not in the business of making pictures. It is possible that painting can symbolize itself and simultaneously reveal some mythic truth, but who knows for sure? The mistake is in thinking there’s a code to break in the first place. That pitiless formalism and singularity are ancient history - a heavy-handed attempt to categorize.
Painting is understood when it is unlocked from rules and language that reinforce the walls of its Euclidean prison. It speaks for itself on its own terms and just is. And you are just you. So shut up and look at me when I’m talking to you!
Excerpt from a conversation with Painting
Born: New Bedford, MA
Raised: Freetown, MA
High School: Apponequet Regional High School, Lakeville, MA
College or University: Bristol Community College, Fall River, MA - Associate in Arts; Fitchburg State College, Fitchburg, MA - BA in Communications and Graphic Design
Now living and working in: New Bedford, MA
Representative Agency: mediumstudio, New Bedford, MA
ARTIST STATEMENT
Typography rules. Anything with birds is great. Only one space after a period. Designing is great except for all those damn clients. Color is overrated. They can’t all be winners. Use your talents to help others.
Born: New Bedford, MA
Raised: New Bedford, MA
High School: New Bedford High School
College or University: Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA – BFA
in Photography; School of Visual Arts, New York, NY - MFA in Painting
Now living and working in: Brooklyn and Manhattan, NY
ARTIST STATEMENT
So much that is written about painting is beside the point, or else is contrived to tell the viewer what to think. Yet it is dangerous, and too easy, to believe that paintings mean whatever we want them to, or that they don’t mean anything at all -that they are simply an artist’s “expression”.
Experience is to be valued above all else, but it must be guided experience. Paintings do not occur in a vacuum and the task therefore is to provide a context for viewing, to guide the viewer toward a range of meanings and possibilities for interpretation.
Cities are an endless source of fascination and excitement for me. At a young age I was introduced to art through photography and I came to love street photography in particular. It is obvious to me only now that this accounts for my intense interest in the urban vernacular of posters, advertising, signs, and wall paintings. When I began to investigate abstract art, as a student in art school, I learned about recent movements in the history of American art that exploited the urban landscape and experience as a source for meaning and space in abstraction. My work unfolds within the context of this history and is successful only insofar as it extends and renews the tradition.
Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “The best abstract painting rests its legitimacy on the persuasive identification of living with looking.” The appearance of fractured language in my recent paintings is the result of a lot of looking, and of constantly photographing the traces and fragments in my environment that spark some visual excitement. The process is very intuitive. My paintings aim to portray the experience of thought and action materially and to make objects of feeling.
Born: Wareham, MA
Raised: Mattapoisett, MA
High School: Old Rochester Regional High School
College or University: Franklin Pierce College,
Rindge, NH – BA in Graphic Design
Now living and working in: Westport, MA
ARTIST STATEMENT
After college, I spent a summer at Pairpoint Glassworks in Sandwich, Mass., then moved to Colorado and opened a glassblowing studio from 1991- 2003. My works have been featured in numerous galleries and exhibits including Pismo Glass Art of Beaver Creek, Colorado, and Wailand Galleries of Hawaii’s Big Island (in the company of glass greats such as Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra, Dino Rosin). During summer and Christmas months, I would show my art at local art fairs.
My glass art is a combination of my ocean and mountain lifestyles, which have also influenced my photography, and painting. Today, I blow glass out of a small studio in Westport, MA. As a former national snowboard champion, I also own and operate a small board shop in Dartmouth called Xtremely Board, where I sell snow, surf, skate and wake boards, as well as all the clothes and accessories. And in addition, I play drums in the very successful, Nate Mott Band.
Born: Philadelphia, PA
Raised: Marion, MA
High School: Tabor Academy, Marion, MA
College or University: UMassDartmouth – BFA (magna cum laude);
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY – MFA, recipient of the US Dept. of Education J.K.Javits National Fellowship
Now living and working in: Brooklyn, NY
ARTIST STATEMENT
A narrative account of your life would suggest a linear experience; a course of events that unfurls sequentially. But that isn’t the way life is experienced first hand, is it? No, things events and emotions pull at us from all directions simultaneously. It is infinitely complex. In the hundreds of thousands of events that take place in one moment, none of them are random.
My life like yours is a weave of many paths, many interests, many events – some controlled by my own hand, others that have come to bear from somewhere else. This is what my artwork reflects upon today – a composition of ‘events’ - each with its own precision, emerging and then receding into the weave of complexity.
In the work, this complexity is formally expressed through the visual density of these drawings and prints. But it is also expressed in the process of making of the work, which involves many hands – artists, architects, students and masters.
In some of the works (the Palimpsest Projections series) I have invited people to work on a collaborative drawing under a specific set of rules. The rule set is a framework, and it is necessary to allow for a consistent language throughout the development of an individual work. Ironically, it is the rule set – which at first may feel a limitation to the individuals who work on these pieces - that provides the resistance that allows for more expressive mark-making. Of the two larger works you see here, one is created with students from an architecture school in New York City and the other is created with students from an art school in Beijing.
The other works (the Contemporary Archeology series) are intaglio prints that have an image created from hundreds of architectural renderings. The prints have been cut, and collaged: The same plate has been printed multiple times. The prints have then been cut into shapes of navigational markers - and then layered, so that the lines of the background are continuous throughout the collage, and the image emerges only as a value shift from the complexity of the background.
Forget what you learned about “stepping back” from a painting and step toward the Contemporary Archeology series prints until your eyes lose their ability to
focus. From this distance you will be able to appreciate the depth of information in the works.
Born: Figueira da Foz, Portugal
Raised: New Bedford, MA
High School: New Bedford High School
College or University: UMassDartmouth – BS in Computer Engineering
Now living and working in: New Bedford, MA
Representative Agency: 4SEE Photographers, Lisbon, Portugal
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a child, I watched in amazement as my father’s cousin developed photographs in the darkroom. In the sterile photographer’s trays, simple chemical reactions created profound images in black and white - images that told stories, images that froze history in the making, images that would become my passion and my life’s work.
Photojournalism offers a medium to reach thousands and thousands of people each day. It gives me the vehicle to tell a story with emotions, not words. Perhaps because photojournalists represent the reality of life, the artistic value of their work is often overshadowed by the unlimited creativity of the painter, or the sculptor, or the poet or the composer. Is the horror of war most profound in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica or Robert Capa’s The Fallen Soldier?
The perspective is personal.
Photojournalism inspires. It shocks. It motivates people every day in newspapers and news magazines around the world. It can reach everyone for the small price of a newspaper.
I am a romantic at heart. I believe my photographs – my art – can change the world.
Born: Providence, RI
Raised: South Dartmouth, MA
High School: Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, MA
College or University: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence;
Cornell in Rome, Italy; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY – BFA in Painting
Now living and working in: South Dartmouth, MA
ARTIST STATEMENT
These Paintings and Others
These are all oil paintings done on masonite covered with a polyurethane finish. They vary comparatively in subject-matter, but individually address the history / narrative / invention / experience of painting: “Red berries” (oil on board, 24” x 17”) are tempting, but indulge in them without knowing where they came from and you’re in trouble; “Painting of a girl about to say something” (oil on board, 30” x 24”) speaks of the ability paintings have to describe themselves—just a few flesh-colored brushstrokes and there they are; “The basket, no eggs” (oil on board,
12” x 9”) is all paintings all the time.
I find painting troublesome on almost all levels. The first thing I do when I start a painting is set the stakes very low and go from there. When it’s good, it’s like grunting or laughing - all those things you do just beyond language but still get the point across. I try to work as efficiently and little as I can on a painting, putting down just enough for things to come together.
These works rely on the trouble of painting, the mess between the thought and the delivery in paint.
Born: New Bedford, MA
Raised: New Bedford, MA
High School: New Bedford High School
College or University: Minneapolis College of Art and Design,
Minneapolis, MN – BFA in Printmaking
Now living and working in: Minneapolis, MN
Representative Agency: M.Y. Art Prospects, New York;
Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston
ARTIST STATEMENT
I look for inspiration in places that require a second (or possibly third and fourth) look. In other words, New Bedford made me the artist I am today. Even after I moved to other cities I found myself pulled toward the parts of town that were most “New Bedford-like.” I feel at home looking at empty parking lots, signs advertising products that no longer exist, and halfhearted attempts to spruce up shop windows.
Let’s face it; there are some pretty unattractive scenes around the Whaling City. But there is a tremendous amount of beauty for those willing to pause and look again. New Bedford taught me how to find enormous pleasure in what formerly got me down.
Born: New Bedford, MA
Raised: Mattapoisett, MA
High School: Tabor Academy, Marion, MA
College or University: Pratt Institute, NY - BFA; University of Washington,
Seattle, WA – Master of Communication in Digital Media
Now living and working in: Seattle, WA
ARTIST STATEMENT
Though raised in Mattapoisett, I have been a Seattle artist and photographer for
the past fourteen years. I’ve worked extensively with commercial, non-profit institutions and publications throughout the world. When not traveling to Africa or Central America on photography assignments, I am the Field Manager with Equal Rights Washington, a leading organization in the movement toward marriage equality and equal rights. My work as been included in several solo and group fine art exhibitions.
No Such Place: Pinhole Photography Portfolio 1996-2008
In this series I’ve used an ultra-wide angle 4 x 5” wooden camera, creating a reflection on portraiture and landscapes. To use this camera is to lose the exacting power of a glass lens and to let go of any preconceived notion of sharpness. The sense of light the pinhole camera imposes on its objects transforms the subject beyond the realistic setting. Based in the tradition of the earliest cameras, these images represent a quiet moment between places.
