ART GALLERY

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  Afterfire With Vessels

  This work has three sections in relief which can be placed differently.

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  Arrivals

  The individual bird forms are made of cut out, recycled, painted boards. I used varied surfaces from common gameboards as Monopoly, Scrabble, Chutes and Ladders to garage sail paint by numbers panels to illustration boards with old painting studies underneath. The bird forms are usually painted in groups of families of twenty to thirty birds. Clothespins and putty allow for constant rearrangement and change. The work has over 600 individual parts.

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  Bird Display

  “Bird Display” features more than 100 cut-out and painted pigeons, doves, shore birds, black birds and created variants on display as if in a natural history museum.

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  Caged

  The bird forms are glued to clothes pins which allow for changing arrangements.

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  City Night with Birds

  Bird forms are made of cardboard with velcro to allow for various placements.

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  Habitat with Birds

  The work uses PVC pipe with mounted grape vine for the display of over 800 individual cut out and painted birds forms. The birds, which are cut from used palettes, are glued to clothes pins which allows for variation in their placement.

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  Helpers

  Bird form cut outs fly away with the gate that they created.

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  Kitchen Mice

  Received a Juror’s Award in the 73rd National Midyear Exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art.

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  No Book Ends

  A playful interpretation of how childrens’ books can take off from their bookshelf and then give birth to fly-away birds made from their pages.

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  Of a Feather

  “...of a feather” is a display. It is an arrangement of parts and sections about a topic that I began exploring about four or five years ago. At the time, I was often visited by birds as I ate lunch on my studio rooftop. Initially, I shared scraps of bread with the birds and this feeding gradually gave way to intense observation and eventually to photographs, drawings, and painted studies of them. The observation inspired library work on birds – research on their types, flight patterns, habitat, etc. I eventually began making and playing with parts – lots of parts: painting of trees, foliage, ground covers, and bird forms – both resting and flying. The parts were cut out and painted then placed on domino shapes or backed with clothes-pins so that they could be placed anywhere. The parts grew into bird facades and cutouts of fences, poles, bushes and gates (places for them to perch). I eventually had enough material so that I could begin to organize the elements. While arranging the individual parts, the overall artwork demonstrated its needs: some of the original parts and sections were taken away while other new pieces were made and added to the final assemblage.

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  Rust Belt Fly Through

  The birds in this work have magnets which allow for changing arrangements. The bottom section of the work is a painted panorama of the East Side bayfront circa 1966.

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  Rust Belt Maze

  An assembled painting that uses an additive and subtractive layering method.

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  Slave Ships

  There was something that intrigued me about the servile ironing board. I bought about ten of them at thrift stores and simply had them in the studio. Coupled with a book club reading about slavery the idea arose for them being platforms or stages and finally “Slave Ships.” The piece uses the well known slave ship Brookes as a departing point for a short essay on the slave trade using customary domino birds as central characters. The bird forms are cut from layers of wood, which are the decks on the ironing boards.

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  Spillway with Birds

  Bird forms and cord are on velcro to allow for various placements.

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  Three Installations

  Installations show some of the painted and cut out bird forms as they visited Presque Isle, our front lawn, and city studio backyard. I plan on having them visit the West 12th Street corridor, the Bayfront, and other venues.

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  Topography with Birds

  Bird forms and cord are on velcro to allow for various placements

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  Twenty Four Gates

  A wall filled with cut-out wooden garden gates showing a variety of my motifs being used as patterns. Everything from birds to falling cats to musical instruments to rats in mazes is featured waiting to be made in cast iron. Each gate is approximately 44 by 24 inches.