Studio Update #3

I hope this letter finds you healthy and engaged. I’d like to share with you my most recent work, which actually goes back in time to the seventies. I made my monochromatic oil paintings from 1975 to 1980. They were the first works I exhibited in New York City at Susan Caldwell Gallery.

Before I made these monochromatic paintings, and even as I worked on them, these pastels’ purpose was to search for a particular way to accumulate color, to figure space, to explore the scale and structure of the work I would be doing in oil.

To fully submerge into both the material and pictorial aspects, I used pure pigment ( chalk and pastels) on paper.

These works may have started as preliminary investigations for what became oil paintings, but very soon, it was apparent that these works in pastels had their own aura and power.
It took the Pandemic, many years later, to find the time to embark on mounting them properly.

This endeavor has brought back a clear memory of my process from that time and the depth of the search to figure out this contemplative body of work. Here, the viewer has to slow down to enter a different plane and experience a different reality.

These works attain equilibrium by searching for light, color, physicality, and to find the right curvature.
They stand apart from the paintings. Their nature is infinite, fragile, and elusive.

Included below is a selection from this body of work from 1975 to 1978.