At the time I painted these, I was living in San Francisco, CA, painting abstractions that were linked to earlier landscape-influenced work. I had recently abandoned landscape imagery because I knew it wasn’t communicating my intentions, which were more about visual phenomena and metaphysics than about places. Likewise, I had come to feel my chromatic vocabulary was limiting me. In 1995, when I saw several exhibitions of Indian gouache paintings celebrating independence from Great Britain, I had to experiment with the gouache medium, and with the close chromatic intervals and complexity of scale in the Mughal manuscripts.
My interest was not in narration, but was more stimulated by the range of emotion expressed by color, harmony, and bluntly juxtaposed spatial relationships. The Indian paintings inspiring me had often been bound into books, to illustrate stories, poetry, or the lyrics of songs, so it made sense to me to show them to my friend, poet Vasiiki Katsarou, when we began discussing an event to be hosted in my Lambertville, NJ studio Spring, 2017. Vasiliki decided to invite a number of poets to compose ekphrastic poetry on the theme “Chroma,” accompanied on my walls by paintings the poets might use for their work. The plan is for us to stage a poetry reading and exhibition of these works in my studio early in 2017. These works were displayed online at Galerie Cerulean, in a show titled "Vocal Color.”
