A SENSE OF SPACE
& PLACE
has been in my DNA
since birth. There is no other
explanation for this phenomenon that has played a significant role in my life long
before I was aware of it. As an only child with my own bedroom, I was mindful
of it being a space of my own, and learned at an early age to appreciate the
experience of privacy. As a young
boy it was the repository for my comic books, toys, and assorted accumulated
treasures. Over the years my room
“grew” with me, reflecting my interests as they evolved, from stacks of comic
books and toys, to Playboy magazines, baseball gloves and art supplies.
Our farm, with its
out buildings, fields, and trees, provided security and an abundance of
intimate places to serve the imagination of a boy and his playmates. My childhood was comfortably contained
in this place with all of its “nooks and crannies” for me to claim as my
own. Although the full
significance of my good fortune was lost on me, I believe even at a young age I
had some sense of appreciation for my lot. Perhaps it wasn’t appreciation as
much as it was the enjoyment of opportunities to explore and create places of
my own: a fort built in the stacks of hay bales in the barn, a secret club room
in the loft over the garage, or a hidden camp site in the woods.
Sharing a space with
someone else was never a problem. In
college and my first two years in medical school I did so with a number of
roommates, never wishing for a room of my own. Our first apartment after I got married during medical
school had a spare room that became my study. And ever since then, wherever I lived, I have always had a
room, and or space to call my own: a study, workshop, or studio. It all happened with little to no
conscious effort on my part, and it was easy to take my good fortune for
granted. It wasn’t until my
divorce, and the painful departure from what had been my home for over 10
years, that I became acutely aware of how important a sense of place was my
wellbeing.
The small two bedroom
apartment on the second floor of a city duplex paled next to the elegant three
story stone Victorian home with its grand yard that I left behind. The furniture was sparse, and there
were none of the accumulated accessories that mark our lives and create a sense
of home with their warmth and intimate reminders of who we are. In my determined struggle to create a
new home and escape the sadness and pain of the divorce, I discovered the
journals of May Sarton. Her
description of her daily life, punctuated with friends, books, writing,
solitude, and flowers, always flowers from her garden, brought to me that
powerful urge of nesting. The need
to create warmth and comfort in a place of my own assumed an importance like
never before. I’m not sure I ever
succeeded, but that apartment marked the beginning of the second half of my
life. And in the years and places
that followed, I continued to have the luxury of spaces of my own.
I have come to
believe that this innate, unconscious awareness of space and place has been a
major influence in my art, long before I became aware of it. In the beginning, my focus was
primarily on the urban environment, stores, shops, streetscapes, markets, and
architecture. It was more graphic
and illustrative than painterly, and I thought of myself as a “story teller”,
using visual images to evoke memories and fondness for a particular place or
scene. Without realizing it, I was
capturing or creating a warmth and intimacy that may have only existed in my vision. In the years that followed my interests
expanded to include rural landscapes, barns and farms, grand urban skylines,
and utilitarian architecture and industrial skylines. And when I tried my hand at clay printing I began exploring
for the first time, abstraction.
But common to all of this work has been my efforts to create a place of comfort
for the viewers, a sense of place where they can experience familiarity and the
pleasure of beauty in both the mundane and the elegant, the humble nobility of
a corner family market, and the grand vista of the high plains.
