Category Archives: Commentary

Coalescence at Nowhere

The last time i was this active was about 20 years ago, and while most of the paintings back then were decorative abstracts I was really most interested in doing surreal conceptual pieces in a realist style. It was easier at that time to separate from real life, give visualization to ideas, and look for answers, not to mention staying up half the night working with tiny brushes. But there was not enough focus, stamina or Red Bull to maintain that, and it eventually became harder to stay awake or get into the right psychological gear. The solution was to shelve the actual painting process, work out the undone compositions in my head, and let them go. Today I only remember the last one, which actually did get sketched out on a canvas - a game show model in an open landscape presenting a framed picture of the same open landscape. No answers there.

What recently pulled me back into painting was my simple and probably childish need for the beach, and the realization that I could sort of be there, even when I wasn’t, by painting where I wanted to be. As opposed to the conceptual-surreal stuff, the exercise has been a tonic rather than a torment. But here lately old motivations have been starting to resurface and mingle with imaginary beach day. Enter False Memory, Colima, a mostly unwelcome collision of impetuses based on an image that’s been in my head for probably 40 years.

Anybody that remembers old Navarre Beach before the high-rises will remember that the intersection of the causeway and beach roads was just a sand-blown 4-way stop with a lonely Tom Thumb sitting adjacent. I liked the look of that spot back then because it felt a lot like nowhere, and therefore very full of possibilities. Though the crossroads now boasts a full blown traffic signal, turn lanes, and landscaping, the way it used to be has stayed with me. The difference today of course is the influence of presence. Things are always gained and lost when more people show up. Colima presents a similar, imagined scene, detached ideally from time and place but marked with vestiges of presence. I had to write a statement about it recently for a submission:

False Memory, Colima (2026)
The painting depicts a location that does not exist, a nowhere rendered as somewhere with the visual authority of a remembered place.

A faded traffic sign marks the remote intersection and issues its directive. In the distance, a ruined structure indicates that the sign was once heeded, but the enterprise failed. Sand encroaches on the road. The systems that made this intersection legible as a place - authority, exchange, maintenance - have withdrawn, and what is left behind is not emptiness, but release. What, then, is lost when a place becomes “somewhere”? The openness of nowhere is a condition this environment has been moving toward all along, interrupted only temporarily by human presence.


The ocean is simply there, as it was before, and as it will be after.

I used a reorientation of the Navarre Beach intersection for the fictional spot that borrows the name of Mexico’s Colima state, where neither the sand nor water actually look like this. It’s only real in my mind and is as appropriate a setting as any for a commentary on nowhere vs. somewhere, or space vs. place.

OK. Place is fundamental to human experience. It’s created when human meaning, intention, and social structure are imposed on space. Colima depicts the reversal of that process - place dissolving back into space as the human systems recede. Place is ultimately temporary, but its development creates limitations and diminishes something that was there before. The sign, stand, and convergence of roads were mechanisms that converted nowhere into somewhere, and their decay represents that conversion collapsing. The sand piling up on the pavement is literally space reclaiming place.


Deemphasizing  the water, especially after spending so much time with shorelines lately, was a departure and the viewpoint backs us far enough away from the beach to reveal the remaining evidence of how people organized a place. The glimpses of the ocean between dunes reminded me of the view while driving stretches of beach road on Okaloosa Island, where it peeks through here and there, continuous, familiar, doing what it always does. For me that usually evokes a kind of topophilia, but this time I wanted the continuity of that blue band to feel indifferent, existing in space with no regard for human activity or intention, doing what it always does. The overarching constant though is the certainty of both gain and loss in the cycle of space and place.

Anyway, this one indulged a desire to do something conceptual, and it was fun to visit the intersection (pun intended) of landscape painting and philosophy of place. I don’t know what else might transpire in this area and I’m still not really pushing for it because I’ve been enjoying keeping things light. It may mean something that the painting I did right after this one was a crab smoking a cigarette.

Categories: Commentary

Mystery and Melancholy: De Chirico Revisited

Copy of de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
The earliest thing I’ve painted that I still have around is a copy of Giorgio de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, done in the spring of 1988 somewhere on the second floor of LSU’s Foster Hall, certainly while wearing a black turtleneck and smoking filterless Camels. I mostly remember having to extend the foreground to fit the canvas board and being happy with the little flag on the corner of the arcade. Those were the days I suppose, when one could skip the regular classes, paint all day with no interruptions and no real consequences, and kid themselves into believing they were doing significant work. But on that particular week this was probably just a geometric, mood, or copying exercise. I don’t remember. If I had thought it would be hanging in my kitchen 40 years later I might have spent more time on it, but probably not. I do know I didn’t appreciate those aimless days as I should have, and every now and then I miss the feel of that mostly-contrived bohème Foster Hall vibe.

But I digress! All that to set up some quick thoughts on de Chirico, father of the pittura metafisica school of the 1910s-20s that would directly influence the surrealists. Unlike them, the practitioners of “metaphysical painting” issued no manifestos or politics, just a shared conviction that ordinary objects and spaces held something underneath, something you could only perceive by looking at them sideways.

De Chirico’s work from this period consisted of dreamlike, disquieting scenes set in mostly deserted urban environments, maybe inspired by the streets of Turin and Ferrara though he was based in Paris at the time. The piazzas are rendered with clean draftsmanship and the architecture is solid enough. But shadows often fall at the wrong angle, the perspective tilts past believable, and the afternoon light feels like it’s been there forever, unchanged. The viewer often observes from the shadows. There are discordant arrangements of items: rubber gloves next to classical busts; artichokes in empty courtyards; mannequins standing where people should be. None of it is random - he was building a symbolic language out of ordinary things in the wrong proximity to each other and letting the collision do the work. He called the effect enigma, and spent his whole early career chasing it.


Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) seems to apply all this unease in one place. The viewer is positioned in an elevated spot to watch the distorted scene of a girl rolling a hoop toward a long shadow cast by an unseen figure. The vanishing points don’t agree with each other and the isometric projection of the open trailer adds to the disorientation. The light is golden-hour warm but the sky is nocturnal and reflects nothing back. So many open doorways. The girl is sketched loosely - present but unresolved, like a memory. A sense of timelessness pervades the scene. These are the kind of things that get the mind going, especially during a semester that was 100 percent fine arts and philosophy classes. I remember enjoying having the excuse to make a mediocre copy.

Certainly the great contribution of de Chirico is exemplified in the original. When the surrealists discovered his work, they immediately recognized what he had unlocked: painted space could be psychologically loaded without being expressionistically distorted, and paranoia could be achieved through a kind of logic that defies logical boundaries. Yay! Ernst, Dali, and Magritte would all borrow from this directly. De Chirico would later repudiate them as well as his own groundbreaking work, lurching into full neoclassical from that point forward. The early work was his most important though and has lost none of its power a century later. I’d suggest checking out more of the paintings from his metaphysical days to anybody not familiar with them - they are thought-provoking, convey real atmosphere, and were the visual building blocks of early surrealism.

I’ve always thought it would be fun to paint an “answer” to Mystery and Melancholy that would put the viewer at street level in one of the openings about halfway down the arcade to reveal what is on the other side of the near building (spoiler - I’m pretty sure it includes the statue from The Enigma of a Day) while preserving the tension. In keeping with the spirit of the original it would have to produce more questions than revelations. Haven’t thought through how that would actually work but I ever get around to trying it I’ll put more effort into it than that copy all those years ago.

Categories: Commentary

Symbolism at Pointe des Chateaux

I don’t usually try to assign narrative to landscape paintings, but last year after seeing some striking footage of Guadeloupe’s Pointe des Chateaux online, I wanted to paint the scene in a symbolic/spiritual context as a gift for a friend. I thought I would share what I had written down about it at the time:


Pointe des Chateaux, View of La Desirade (2025)
The Pointe des Chateaux is the easternmost point of Grande Terre island in Guadeloupe of the French West Indies. The narrow, windward peninsula is marked by its outcropping of jagged rock formations eroded over many years by the turbulent surf. The top of the cape provides a unique vantage point to view the formations and the west end of the Guadeloupean island of La Desirade which is about 5-6 miles to the east.


The image shows a period of relative calm at the cape, observed from its highest point in early afternoon. The viewpoint is nearly due east. A large cross erected at the location is the focal point of the composition and actual site. It is about 40 feet tall and seen clearly from the nearby beach just out of view to the north, the location from which the area is more commonly observed and photographed. The lines of the composition and the actual geography converge at the structure, and to me the scene evoked a narrative.

The presence and intent of the cross at Pointe des Chateaux are accepted here as a representation of true faith, the recognition and receipt of God’s gift of redemption for His own. The physical cross itself, however, is a human construct. It can be taken to reflect the paradoxical message of Philippians 2:12: the responsibility of believers to be active in the outworking of their own salvation, despite the inability to effect it outside of God’s sovereign action. True believers necessarily seek to align with the spiritual and holy nature of Christ, but the effort is difficult and the task impossible to achieve this side of heaven, as they are tethered to a material environment and a fallen nature. Still the responsibility remains.


The ocean can be taken to represent the world, its influences, and temptations. Day and night the Pointe cross faces the open Atlantic, displaying the increasing wear consistent with its assignment. The degradation of the peninsula beyond and below the site implies the eventual failure of a structure that stands on the merits of its man-made construction alone.


To varying degrees the things of this earth distract everyone from the things above. From the high ground at Pointe des Chateaux, as with all Caribbean vistas, the view is enticing and seemingly endless. It reflects the striking beauty of the creation as well as the myriad possibilities for one’s earthly pursuits. La Desirade here represents those pursuits. The island fixes the horizon at an attainable distance while the squall off its coast implies challenge and uncertain gain. The Pointe cross does not directly face it. At this particular moment its orientation is square to a horizon that meets clear sky. In this part of the world the sun and the hurricane approach from the same direction, and everything else is subject to both.


Man has no divine assurance of earthly happiness and security. What believers have is divine assurance of eternal happiness and security in Christ. It is this knowledge that allows them to fix their attention in a direction beyond the material and towards an eternity of fellowship with God, despite all obstacles and temptations.

Categories: Commentary