IS THE U.S. OPEN? 9/11/09
 I've never been a sports fan but I'm becoming one -- Two guys or gals go at each other with all they've got. Balls fly over nets at 140 miles per hour, sweat pours, people get hurt... but somehow it's fair. The rules are there. No one need comandeer a jet aircraft into a wall of concrete to be heard; no one need take an 84 floor plunge off a burning building after saying "goodbye" to all they love.

NEXT 9/03/09
 The new renaissance will occur when the bandwidth broadens to the point where this view and that are not mere objects to be packaged in the next 15 minute warholian "rush, ("obliteration as abject form of veneration") but purposeful marks in a picture plane that ignite a larger discussion of who we were, where we are, why we are, and who we want to be.

ANALYZE THIS 8/12/09
 It's curious how immeasurable things are -- even in a "google analytics" world. It seems the closer we get, the further away we are. The problem lies in the question itself. I cannot help but think of Christ, and the story thereof, who if he, she or it were measured at the time of resolution and fast approaching doom, would have scarecely rated a blip on the "tweeter meter." Two thousand years later the resonance of which creeps up from breakfast to dinner, and most things in between. My coolest friends shriek at the mention and I understand... as the argument remains passionate, precisely or not, because this began as a story that was not at all about analytics, popularity, or approval... but something else without beginning or end.

INDEPENDENCE 7/4/09
 from what? Our brains, our hearts? Who can iron, much less care for another human being... with so many information pixels permeating a space we used to think of as our own?

HAIRCUT WITH INA...  6/17/09
 Ina clips my locks for a bargain. She's not what she appears. But are any of us? I'm reading "The Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard and he makes the succinct point that if he were to compress all of me into a pint-sized box, it wouldn't say anything about who I am. Ina tells me she is reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude," checked out from the new library on 44th Street. Indeed. All is never as it appears. Then again, appearances matter... good cut!

WOW 6/6/09
 Who would have imagined in 2001, the year that we watched our "Windows on The World" collide into dust, that our world would have turned around so much as to have "Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas" the featured GO TO SEE cultural festival in today's New York Times. It's all taking place in Brooklyn. Where else? Still... WOW. But isn't that why we all moved to New York City?

Our concept of MOVEMENT changes in The Age of information. We might be moving most when we stand still; this as I listen to "The Man Who Can't Be Moved" by The Script.
OPENING THE DOORS IN CHINA...  6/4/09
 On the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Revolution in China, doors might be opening for money but not for freedom.

LOOKING TO THE PAST TO UNDERSTAND THE FUTURE...  6/1/09
 Shortly after 2001, I visited an Iconography Exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was struck by this description, “Icons were a source of comfort to a nation besieged.” I had been struggling with my work and pondered, “Is my art a source of comfort to anyone?”

This led me to explore a tradition/process of painting heretofore unknown to me, the world of iconography; a direct contrast to my Western European oriented training and individualistic leanings (which often led me more to the Vermeer side of the museum and, I might add, still do.) But to know who we are, especially in such times where misunderstanding is rampant between one side of the globe and the other, it is important to discover that which we do not know…

The two works I will show here are both the outcome of such exploration. One looks back to the 6th century CE and the other speaks to the imagery of today and the future.The Sinai Christ Pantocrator, written/painted while on a workshop at Kanuga Camp Conferences in Fall 2007 with teacher Teresa Harrison, is created using acrylic pigments and gold-leaf. Like most icons, it is composed of a multitude of thin washes or layers of color one atop the other, and the outcome is a very flat, deliberately non-textured surface. Pale-Male: A Pilgrimage is painted using a digital palette of over 16 million colors which is then output not to a sanded board (like a traditional icon) but to an interconnected zone of ether that compresses thousands of layers into an ephemeral moment that can only be described as immaterial… the flattest of the flat. Going even further, this digital galaxy extends the parameters of the traditional icon, (which can be copied and shared in finite increments) to one that can be shared in the global sense… i.e, infinitely, or wherever, whenever anyone cares to plug-in.

There are many opportunities and challenges for artists to explore in today’s digital universe. Like the novelists and poets who shaped meaning from a democracy of words after the evolution of the Guttenberg Press, we find ourselves in an analogous world, however one where imagery is the new rising language. I would argue that the calling for today’s artist is to bring meaning and understanding to that world of visual information, loading our brush with media, intelligence and compassion.

This piece was first published by invitation of The Episcopal Cafe.

A NEW DAWN...  1/11/09
 Can a drawing that looks like this be made with a tool that looks like this? It's pretty exciting. LISTEN IN to my 3 minute reflection on "In The Morning" with Bonnie Grice, an NPR afiliate station which has the only weekly program in the United States devoted exclulsively to two straight hours of arts and culture.(WLIU, 88.3)