And now a little self promotion that starts with a story that must be told, as I hope that it is a lesson for visual artists from an “insider.”

In the Greater Washington DC area, there’s a biennial sort of painting review held at the McLean Center for the Arts, which is often curated by a senior museum curator from the DC area. It is a way to sample the state of painting in the area. It is called “Strictly Painting.”

Around 1999 or 2000, the juror for that year's version of "Strictly Painting" was Terrie Sultan, who back then was the Curator for Contemporary Art at the Corcoran (she’s now the director of the Baffler Gallery at the Art Museum of the University of Houston). I thought that this choice was a little odd, as Ms. Sultan, in my opinion, was not "painting-friendly." In fact, with all due respect, I blame her for diminishing the Corcoran Biennials, which used to be known as the Corcoran Biennial of Painting. As such, they were essentially the only well-known Biennial left in the nation that was strictly designed to get a look at the state of contemporary painting, which was somehow surviving its so called "death."

It was Ms. Sultan who decided to "expand" the Biennial and make it just like all other Biennials: Jack of all trades (genres) Biennials. In the process, depending on what side of this argument you're on, she (a) did a great service to the Corcoran by moving it into the center of the "genre of the moment" scene - like all other Biennials, or (b) gave away the uniqueness of the nation's top painting Biennial. When she was announced as the juror, I decided to see if I could predict her painting selectivity, sensitivity, process and agenda. It was my thesis that I could predict what sort of painting Ms. Sultan would pick.

So I made a secret bet with another well-known DC area museum curator, and decided to enter the exhibition with work created specifically to fit what I deduced would be agreeable to Ms. Sultan's tastes. I felt that I could guarantee that I would get into the show because of the transparency of the juror's personal artistic agenda. It is her right to have one; I have them, in fact, we all have them.

I was trained as a painter at the University of Washington School of Art, but around 1992 or so, I stopped painting and decided to devote myself strictly to my love for drawing. So I had not picked up a brush in several years when I decided to enter this competition, designed to survey the state of painting in our region. It was my theory that Ms. Sultan would not be in the representational side of painting. It was also clear that she (like many of today’s curators) was seduced by technology in the form of videos, digital stuff and such other exciting new genres. And so I decided to see if I could marry digital stuff with painting.

And what I did was the following:
I took some of my old Navy ribbons, and scanned them in to get a digital file. I then blew them up so that the final image was quite pixilated. I then printed about five of them and took slides of the printed sheets of paper.I then submitted these slides to the competition, but identified them as oil on canvas paintings. My plan was that if accepted, how hard could it be to whip up a couple of paintings after the fact? I titled them with such titles as Digitalism: National Defense and Digitalism: Expeditionary Medal and so on. From what I was later told, several hundred painters submitted work. And Ms. Sultan selected about only about seven or eight painters in total. And not only was I one of them, but she picked two of my entries. I was elated! I had hit the nail right on the head! I felt so superior in having such an insight into this intelligent woman's intellect that I (a painter no more) could create competition-specific work to get accepted into this highly regarded show. And then I began the task of creating the two paintings, using the pixilated images as the guide. And it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. For one thing, I had submitted the "paintings" in quite a large size; each painting was supposed to be six feet long. And it didn't take me long to discover that there are a lot of color nuances and hues in an average pixilated image.

And I went through dozens and dozens of rolls of tape as I pulled off the old Washington Color School trick of taping stripes (in my case small one inch square boxes of individual colors - hundreds upon hundreds of them) in a precise sequence to prevent smudging and color peeling, etc. I also painted dozens of small sized trials, usually watercolors or acrylics on gessoed paper, in order to get a sense of the final product. I painted for at least six hours every day, switching off between paintings to allow the previous day's work to dry off enough to allow a new layer of tape to be applied. I did all the varnishing outside, which usually attracted all the small neighborhood ruffians. It was incredibly hard work, and I was ever so sorry that I had even gotten this crazy idea. All my nights were consumed. But eventually they were finished and delivered to the exhibition and Ms. Sultan even wrote some very nice things about them in the exhibition's catalog. Me? I was in a mix of both vindication and guilt; exhausted but fired up with the often wrong sense of righteousness of the self-righteous.

After the show, I had no idea what to do with them, and they didn't fit my "body of works," but eventually I ended up selling both of them through Sotheby's. And today, some art collector in South Carolina and another one in Canada each have one very large, exhausting and handsome oil painting of pixilated naval ribbons hanging in their home, in happy ignorance of the interesting story behind them. I mentioned the adjective handsome in describing them, because a few years ago I was telling this story to Prof. John Winslow, (former head of the School of Art at Catholic University) who asked to see the images of the real paintings. When I showed him, he said that they were actually "quite handsome paintings." I had never had my work described as "handsome" (although the Washington Post once described my drawings as "irritating"), so it stuck in my head. So there you have it: The story of a former painter with a point to prove about a local curator, the subsequent hard-labor punishment of the process, and a hidden story behind two handsome paintings. And now move to the present. Sometime in 2007, I was relating the above story to someone, and the painting bug bit me again. You painters in the audience know exactly what I am talking about.And so I began to explore this type of paintings again, and to publish them and sell them. And then, a few months ago I was approached by the director of the new R Street Gallery in the Dupont Circle gallery cluster of Washington, DC. He had seen my new paintings online and liked them, and was interested in offering me a solo show at his new gallery.

I was honored by his request, but also, other than the original draft watercolors and acrylics, all the original large paintings as well as the ones that I painted in 2007 had been sold – did I mention that it takes forever to paint one of the final works? And so instead I offered to curate a show for him that included work by several key DC area artists working around the concept of color, applied in specific forms and formats, as these works had been. And thus, on January 16, 2008, I invite all of you to come by the R Street Gallery, 2108 R Street, NW in Washington, DC, walking distance from the Dupont Circle Metro stop, telephone 202/588-1701. From 6-8PM there will be an opening reception for “Color Invitations,” which is the title of the show, and it will include some of those watercolor pieces from 2000, as well as a new “Digitalism” painting, plus work by Maggie Michael, Andrew Wodzianski, John Blee, Steve Lapin, Amy Lin and Jeffry Cudlin, a star-studded group of DC area painters all clustered around the issue of color.

See ya there!

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