After being watercolor painter for over 35 years I started exploring painting with oil after viewing the Gerhard Richter exhibit at SFMOMA (2002). I have no stylistic connection with his work but upon carefully observing his masterful use of oil paint I realize that I needed to change medium in order to increase the scale, presence and viability of my work if I was going to move forward and grow as a painter. It was a surprisingly difficult transition with all of my initial goals of simply translating my watercolors into oil paintings largely un-realizable. I did however develop an unrelated direction that hopefully has the potential to produce substantive paintings.
The larger paintings are oil paint on stretched linen primed with a lead oil ground. The standard size is 30” x 40”. They are often painted on a parallel time frame as the oil on paper series and share the same colors and formal concerns.