This is "Gone for Coffee" (40" x 30"  o/c)

It speaks to starting over. New life for an old chair, a room, and, mostly perhaps, the person who's gone for coffee. Sometimes you have to strip a life bare to see what it's made of, to appreciate and understand the forces shaping it. You examine the cracks. The worn edges. The damage. And then you decide what to preserve. What to eliminate. What's important.

I also thought it was a damn cool chair.

Seated Figure

o/c 24x18

I completed this painting during a workshop in 1990 and it's the first painting
 that I actually kept. The first one that I felt was truly finished and the resemblance to the model accurate. The instructor's name was Russell Keeter, an acclaimed painter and anatomist who taught in Detroit for 25 years. During classes and workshops he would beautifully render the human form.  From the inside out. 
Bones first, then muscles, then skin.
With compressed charcoal.
 Attached to a long stick.
An avid handball player, he won many national and international senior competitions.
He had a heart attack a year after the workshop - on the court, I'm told - and died at age 56. 
It was an incredible loss to the Detroit art community.

- 30 -

o/c 41x44

Historically, the symbol - 30 - was used by journalists to signal the end

of their stories, so I thought that was a good place to begin this blog.

(A curious thing that blogs end where they begin.)

- 30 - evolved as a meditation on color and texture, nine 5x7 canvases

that flowed one to the next. Well, that didn't feel quite right. The work

grew to 12 panels, then 16, on to 25, and, ultimately, 30. Perfect.

Who said painters don't know when to stop?
This work was accepted in the Toledo Area Artist's Exhibition several years ago.
It now hangs in my dining room.