/* ****************************************************************************************** * * Artist's Blog * * ***************************************************************************************** */ var ARTIST_BLOG = '

"I dearly love to draw", said Edgar Degas. Me too! I love to draw and have carried a sketchbook/journal most of my adult life. I wear dark glasses and have enjoyed catching quick portraits of "the man at the next table" or a person in the museum studying a painting or having "lunch in the cafe" with a friend. A show of these drawings led to courtroom illustration work for Newsday and CBS TV News.

The land, everywhere, but especially in the rural areas and off the highways completely captivates me. California\'s hills are especially exciting as well. Mother Earth in the flesh! I loved rendering what I saw in an al la prima passionate stroke. The never ending varieties of line, texture and color, the light in the mist just at dawn, the mystery of the full moon on the rise, these can take me right out of this world. For a decade I explored multilayered large evocative canvasses of an abstracted, sensual, feminine imagery. Lately I\'ve been doing some large digital photography: landscapes depicting the textures, colors, and lines that attract me as well as the amorphous off light of dawn\'s moon and mists and the like. But the pleasure of developing an image on a large canvas that reflects the multi-textured and simple, sensual and spiritual, filmy but real moments plucked from my memory is not work for me. It is as Picasso said, "I paint as I breathe..."

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