Lessons From The Dancing Master

Untitled Sketch from The Dancing Master Series

The question of Influence and Inspiration.


Three weeks after the intensity of New York, the false cheer of several fundraisers to aid the flood relief after Hurricane Irene, and the complications of multiple family birthday celebrations, I am back in my studio, facing my own work. There is no avoiding the issue of why I am an artist when all the introspective thought I allow here in this space comes galloping at me as I settle in at my work table.

I come from a very artistic family, with professional artists of many generations on both sides, cousins, siblings,nephews. Nearly exclusively they were or are working at the representational end of the realism/abstraction spectrum.
I have always known I was an artist, but I didn't really start painting until I was in my twenties, in my last semester of college, and after many drawing and printmaking classes. It took a while, and many frustrating classes before I realized I was most influenced by landscape, longer still to give up trying to paint en plein aire. 

I try to walk and hike in nature often. Only recently I have been bringing along the small camera I bought last year to take photos of work I saw in New York. The idea of recording things visually in photographs is very new and foreign to me. I have very few until recently, and there is a swath of nearly 2 decades of my life were there are virtually no photographs of me or my life at all. The  idea of actively seeking out and capturing the inspiration for my work seems even more foreign. For most of my career I have only known what I was interested in by looking at my paintings.