As studio work, I offer my abstract painting as a 60-year student and lover of the 700-year-old canon of European-American painting—both figurative and now, for the last hundred years, also abstract. I want to provide a visually original and lasting 21st century viewing experience that extends that tradition.

As personal expression, I offer my abstract painting as visual art for interested viewers the way musicians offer music for their listening audience. I want to make the viewing experience a continuing pleasure that will attract and reward repeated viewing, both brief and extended.

I work to provide that pleasure through a combination of body-language markmaking (meaning fully abstract, declaratively personal paint-handling and paint-color work) and geometric/mathematical composition.

Hence, I’ve always called the Symmetry and Hues work the “brushmarks” paintings as color-field studio practice, but when I’m expressing my hope to mak­­e personal contact through them, I call them little love songs.

*

I was born in 1947 and grew up in the 1960s. In 1965, my summer after high school, I travelled from Paris to Istanbul/Constantinople via Italy and Greece, then back to Paris, seeing the European art I’d been studying for four years as art history for art class. One bag, trains and hitching, across a safe, very inexpensive Old World that welcomed post-war American and Canadian kids.

I really liked “doing art” in and outside of school. I did ok academically by memorizing, but art was different. For me, doing art in public school, and then in high school art class—as well as at home throughout for my own constantly changing visual interests—especially meant being rewarded with happy personal contact. I could make art out of my imagination and when I showed my pictures to others their response usually convinced me that I really had shared some of my pleasure in both making and showing them my work.

I was born in Virginia in the Camp Lee station hospital. My dad was a career officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces (the USAF since 1947) who had survived the air war over Europe. But he died when I was five, and my Canadian mother returned home—so I went to public and high school in a brand-new suburb of Toronto. My mother had been a supply officer in the Canadian forces early in the war, stationed in Toronto when the US Army air forces were training nearby with the RAF before the US entered the war.

In the fall of ‘65, I went to Boston University’s College of Business Administration. I knew pretty soon that my future needed serious reconsideration. So I joined up before spring in ‘66 and spent the next two years in the Seabees (the Navy’s Marine-supporting combat construction battalions—CBs), acquiring some military discipline—including in Vietnam, mostly as a security lookout, out in the country, in the dark, in silence. I decided to be a painter.

And while my service experience was helping me figure that out, it also took me (serendipitously, to understate) to the new art world. After the three month confinement of basic training in San Diego, I was stationed first in Rhode Island—with Boston and New York nearby for weekend liberty—and then back in California, just a short bus ride north of the new, very contemporary-art-aware LACMA. The ‘60s were an eye-opening decade for modern painting. Think Warhol.

The painting that riveted me, however, was fully abstract. I saw Mondrian’s 1920s grids of irregularly sized rectangles, Pollock’s and Kline’s postwar/1950s body-language painting, Gene Davis’ 1960s taped fields of identical width vertical stripes, Noland’s Targets, Louis’ poured rivulet-stripes, and Poons’ dots. I saw body-language markmaking and geometric composition, and the gloriously optimistic paint-color work they could deliver.

In ‘68 I went back to Boston, where my wife of now 55 years was graduating from BU in ‘69, and started painting. We moved to Toronto that fall, and have stayed nearby. (And I could still see the abstract color painting that excited New York through the 1960s, live in the Toronto gallery of an outstanding collector and dealer of that work, David Mirvish—a David Smith sculpture out front to welcome you. My first Toronto studio, in 1969, was three doors down the street.)

I’ve been painting and studying painting continuously since, pursuing my own way to advance the now century-old fully abstract painting tradition. But I’ve had the personally fortunate chance to experiment and explore forward on my own, and haven’t shown. So welcome to my first show, a late retrospective for your 21st century viewing pleasure. I hope you’ll expand some of the paintings to see their compositions individually. Thanks for coming.