A SENSE OF SPACE & PLACE

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.