Artist Statement

The “Venus of Long Island” series examines beauty and the representation of the human form. But more specifically, the paintings in this series explore the concept of grace. American abstract painters renounced beauty in search of the sublime. I find both beauty and the sublime within the concept of grace. Grace has a number of distinct definitions, including the indwelling of the divine within the human. The divine is immortal, that which transcends time and the individual life. Grace could be confused with elegance; but elegance is acquired, whereas grace is an authentic expression of human nature.

In the Middle Ages, any painting of the unclothed female human figure was called a “Venus.”  Somehow the location of the subject in antiquity made its sensuality acceptable to an ascetic society. We are today emerging from an epoch, which also shunned sensuality in art. Through much of the twentieth century, beauty, mimesis, representation and pictorial depth of field were considered decadent and out of step with the renunciatory asceticism of advanced artists. Today artists and critics are welcoming back representational painting.

I have chosen a subject and a setting that is intentionally atemporal. Here, I am the subject, on one hand, engaging a tradition of self-portraiture and self-invention, and on the other hand I am Venus, the eternally recurring archetype of feminine grace in the same sort of hypostasis that allows ordinary people to be heroes, idols, gods, goddesses, or, indeed, artists. On a technical level, the paintings manifest my fascination with the skin, a fascination that has touched all figurative painters, both with its difficulty and its beauty. The skin is a translucent material with many layers that has a warmth, a glow, and a softness that presents an almost infinite number of choices and imperceptible gradations of tone.

The body is examined in contrast to a very limited number of other textures. The two paintings with vertical or square compositions feature only the body and the sand. Whereas the body is limited, unitary, smooth, organized, and inhabited, sand is infinite, granular, fractured, rough, chaotic. The body rises from the sand, which supports it. We have the sense of the salt air and the sounding surf, two further elements which are made explicit in the two paintings with major horizontal axes. The figure’s placement in these two paintings suggest the figure’s location in psychic space; resting on the sand of chaos, level with the undulating waves of sea (which is the unconscious, composed of both the history of technique that flows through the artist and the passions of the body with its own history) and emerging into the clear, slightly violet light of spirit.