A primary focus for my work in the 1970s and 1980s was the industrial landscape which surrounded my former studio in San Francisco. I was particularly drawn to the nearby Bethlehem Steel shipyards. This grey world by day came alive at night as fierce security lighting and arc welder's torches illuminated and drew shapes out of the darkness.
City Shapes 1, 2011, Oil on canvas 27 x 37 in.
Structure, as it is played upon by light in space, has been a recurring them in my paintings. I am drawn to shapes that arrive in the landscape out of an idea of utility more than one of conventions of aesthetics. It is "the structure of the ordinary", whether objects from the kitchen table or the raw industrial edge of the city, as well as the freeway that laces it together, which holds my attention.
In some of these paintings, I have merged the two worlds — where objects of domesticity are set in the foreground against a cruder, rough-edged, industrial world, the difference being only a matter of scale. It is through the juxtaposition of these two worlds, often from a wide-angled viewpoint, vibrant colors that ricochet around a piece, and the use of light, especially as it emerges out of darkness to reveal hidden shapes, that I attempt to achieve a sense of mood.