Stone Compositions

Late one September night I received a group text that the civil war era building that housed our studios was on fire. It took two days to get it under control. It wasn’t the fire that destroyed my paintings, it was the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that put out the fire, and then the time it took for us to be able to return to remove what we could, which allowed mold and decay to set in.

After it was clear our studios were to be demolished, I secured a new studio but couldn’t find a narrative post fire. I’d been painting the figure almost exclusively for five decades and suddenly felt lost, stopped, and I couldn’t restart.

As the months went by, I started noticing groupings of stones, took some photos, and soon started drawing them. I became fascinated with the random communities of subtle color and shape, each stone an individual, pitted, scarred or smooth, formed over eons by pressure, heat, water and wind, containing within them a history of plants, animals, and minerals, the history of the earth, the universe, like artifacts of time.

Now that I have started to paint them, I think of them as portraits, individuals building into a group, like notes in a musical composition searching for rhythm and melody. I think of them in motion, falling, and the sounds of them as they shift.