Born Los Angeles, California 1957
Education:
Ph.D. (art history), Columbia University 1994; M.A., UCLA 1982; B.A., Harvard
University 1980; credential in studio art, Accademia N. Simi, Florence
1978.
My
early training in art was rooted in the European tradition. As a student
of art history I was greatly affected by the ideas and methodology of S.
J. Freedberg. Most of my work prior to 1997 is traditional figurative
art, mainly oil paintings. Over the past several years, however, I've been
painting in direct reaction to the origins and development of abstract and
non-objective European and American painting from 1900 through 1970, exploring
the ideas and expressive properties of the art and answering in each case with
a series of new pictures responsive to the early models through the filter of
my temperament. The history of European formalist modernism's first broad
range of adventures fascinates me, both for the art's genuine achievements and
for its now familiar, even quaint visual appeal. My paintings are exercises by
a lifelong student of form in art, as well as a kind of personal painterly
record of modern art history.