Portfolio of Works

DBG works are oil paintings, generally on linen mounted on board, using a mixture of the left-over paints on my palette, so-called "palette dirt." Although there is some black occasionally in it (I use very little black), and I try to keep white out of it, DBG is all color. It is an organically occurring grey composed of the colors in my normal palette. I spent two years engineering a process to reuse the leftover paint, including how to rehydrate it. Zoom in on DBG paintings to see bits of this color and that color breaking out from the mix.

When I lived in Japan in university, I fell in love with sumi-e (black ink painting) and shodo (black ink calligraphy). Most Saturdays, I tried to find time to go to some exhibition or another of black ink art. DBG paintings are my way, as an artist based in Colorado, of expressing the dynamic emotions I experience seeing such works.

DBG paintings are generally based on vintage photos centered in or around Colorado that are over one hundred years old. Some come from public domain images of circuses that came through Colorado, some the indigenous people in or who came through Colorado, ranchers, settlers, miners, hunters, city folk.

These are paintings with a DBG underlay, then color layers over that. The grey holds the structure; the color holds the encounter.

These are paintings of figurines because they are objects outside my daily experience, chosen precisely for that distance. A figurine holds still. It lets you look. What arrives in the looking is me. 

These DBG paintings are inspired by Colorado class photos from the late nineteenth century when photography first became available to people here.

Note the looks on their faces. I'm sure they were told to hold still, so as not to blur the image, but look at the questions in their eyes as they stare into the lens wondering what is about to happen.

Why children? Because schools then apparently did as they do now and invited all the children to participate. In studio photography of the time, we see people, generally adults, who were wealthy enough, educated enough, and interested enough to have their images preserved. In these, we see the faces of the people who actually lived here. 

Works in the Geometries of Color collection explore the idea that color holds a geometry before the mind names what the eye sees. These paintings stay in the moment of observation before recognition, the weights of light and rhythms of color.