My art study started with the Josef Albers color class, which opened my eyes to painting as a visual medium - considering the effect of one color on its neighbor rather than just making pictures. Visually, I was especially intrigued by the so-called Bezold effect, illustrated here, where the lighter and darker squares change the background color and open up layers in space. It inspired my interest in Cézanne and in Paul Klee, whose improvisation and interest in children’s art resonates with my later interest in parks, recreational sites and schoolyards. I’ve always liked to use compartments and internal frames.

Later, at the New York Studio School, I developed an expanded approach to collage under abstract expressionist George McNeil, who taught us Hans Hofmann’s process of abstracting perceptual space, encouraging free improvisation from the model in the studio. We worked with paint and colored paper, culminating in the emergence of figures from the expressive field. Meanwhile, I was also working outdoors from everyday landscapes, following Cézanne.

I began combining work from observation with collage.

Frustrated by the grays and browns that tended to dominate my observational paintings, I made up colored paper in the studio and applied it to drawings on small panels, depicting scenes I had painted outdoors in colors I generated on my own. I tried to combine collage with my Cézannesque outdoor oil paintings. I drew images from my paintings onto small wood panels and filled them in with pasted colored papers made up in the studio. I wanted color more like Matisse and made up colors I wanted to see, rather than trying to imitate the subdued browns and grays of everyday landscapes. The color constructions with simple planes reminded me of early Renaissance paintings.

I moved to Maine in 1980 for my partner’s teaching job at Colby College. Living in Maine, I was inspired by Marsden Hartley and Alfred Stieglitz’s idea of the local, of American artists applying European modernism to local scenes.

This was made a few years later in New York, which I conceived as more gray, and related to Mondrian’s overall space in his plus/minus compositions, like Pier and Ocean, that aren’t completely abstract – I preserved the underlying drawing as way to focus on details, to keep grounded in a specific local place – in this case a view towards Grant’s Tomb - following the idea of Stieglitz, who saw value in the way the local links us to memories and subconscious associations.

Back in Maine here, I’m using color like Hans Hofmann but with a real landscape, Mt. Philip, near Rome, Maine. Still linked to the specific with drawn details, overlaid with paint and collage – the drawing dates from 1989 but collaging and painting weren’t finished until 1994.

In 2000 we moved to California, where I had to adjust to a very different local landscape of suburban subdivisions. Trying to cope with the new environment, I went back to the Bezold effect, but this time on a larger scale, envisioning a combination of Albers with Hofmann. The Bezold effect has increasingly come to pervade my perceptually based work, in association with my attraction to public spaces like parks and playgrounds – the social permeating the personal.

This comes from a series in 2010 I entitled Field and Frame, based on art historian Meyer Schapiro’s analysis of visual signs as flat, bounded, material fields. Here I go back to the compartments of the early Albers studies, but am now beginning to combine the Bezold effect with observed landscapes – assuming a more distanced perspective on myself as I work.

I was thinking back to Paul Klee and his involvement with children’s art in this image of Birch Lane, my son’s elementary school – inspired by his free play with grids to combine structured security with improvisation. The Bezold effect functions like a surgical suture, fracturing the unified conventional view.

I found in public spaces a context for this combination of formal play with actual sites. Here I’m going further into parks and recreation. There’s a ball field and a circular track where I go to run. I began thinking more about our process of perception – what do we really see? My interest shifted from the literal subject to how it’s encountered by our shifting attention – a sort of self-awareness inspired by the social setting of a public space. I came to think of this approach as “social perception”.

This is a large, multi-panel piece – about 6 by 9 feet. I wanted to explore the way we map the everyday spaces of our neighborhood, developing a personal attachment to places we’re familiar with. I took a cinematic approach, going out and painting houses and yards every day and posting them on my studio wall so I could edit them – rearranging the panels and adding colored paper in the Hans Hofmann manner to create an overall image. It’s a sort of psychogeography, recapitulating the way we become at home in everyday places.

Beginning in 2008, my work from the local landscape expanded to the Pacific Island of New Caledonia, where I had taught art in the rural village of Nessakouya as an undergraduate in 1966-67. Documenting its changing configuration, I looked for patterns of community, “community. spaces”. This work, painted on site with collage added in the studio, depicts a new “community house” set up by the Melanesian villagers in an effort to foster social contacts among members of rival clans.

This piece collages together images from New Caledonia and Davis to link two “villages”. It combines photographs with paintings, trying to embrace the range of our visual interactions with the world, including what’s internalized in memory or absorbed from media.

This collage combines photos of Davis at night and garden drawings made by a Melanesian villager. Darkness, the context of dreams, fosters a condensation of images.

There’s further compression in this piece from 2016 – eight small frames in a 4 by 3 foot rectangle. They record a circuit of the park where I run – benches, baseball field, butterflies from a collection I made as a child and still keep in the studio. I’m inspired by undefined spaces open to memory and reflection, which are harder and harder to find – like the neighborhood field where I used to collect insects. Circles become important as I continue to think about the 360-degree field of vision - what we really experience in a landscape rather than “see” in the limited one-point perspective of the camera. One section of this park contains a circle of stones that connects to the zodiac but also provides some bike jumps for kids.

Three years ago I started to use a video camera – literally engaging with cinematic vision to embrace the entire 360-degree field. I draw from the video as it plays, still using drawing to ground things in everyday places, but allowing video to open up my focus – I like how video artist Peter Campus talks about “durational perception”. Video links my work to the media realm.

Drawing from the video, my attention jumps from one focal area to another as it does in our normal seeing. And what happens in between? If the Bezold effect creates sutures in the field, now I’m dealing with actual gaps. I use the color grid to fill in the intervening spaces, incorporating their unnoticed, unconscious content while supplying the overall vertical/horizontal framework, based in gravity, that we use for orientation.

This recent 4-part landscape combines elements from videos with disparate sections of colored paper. I like experimental film and seek a sense of narrative through collage that’s not explicit, an overall feeling rather than a visual document. The frames zoom in and out; the lower right becomes a close-up. The juxtaposition of frames implies movement through time, as in a comic.

Collage has always dealt with the fragmentation of modern life, offering glimpses of unity . It brings out the abstraction inherent in lived experience. l try to endow this collage experience with the weight of Cézanne’s enduring forms.