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From the Studio Window 16"x20" Oil  painted on  1-1-2017

Artists travel all over the world looking for subject matter. As I am getting older travel brings about major anxieties that I do not want to deal with. And honestly, at this time, I do not have a reason, or want to go to any specific place that I can think of, only to have a superficial experience of a place in just a few days, and come back with a bunch of photos that I simply forget about once I am back to our beautiful Oregon and especially to the comfort of my home and studio. Having said this I wouldn’t mind going to a new place that I really love to experience but spend months, or even a year in order to really know the place and become part of it in that duration. As I have said, for me I feel that spending a couple of days in an exotic place, being overwhelmed by what I see, is a waste of time.

Yet it is important to keep my enthusiasm for painting at high pitch, as it has been, for me, for many years since I started my painting career. One way to do this is that I need to have a new outlook on what I see, and experience around me. To look at the familiar like I have never seen before.  With that in mind I am in the process of painting what’s around me with an inventive manner, sort of and experiment in being attuned to the subject as a familiar representational subject, yet abstract it in color and form and let the painting lead me wherever it may.

This doesn’t mean that I would start with a set idea in mind and change drastically the way I paint, but instead gradually let the painting or paintings lead me wherever they need to go, which may free me, to a certain extent, of what I usually do. Understandably it is experimental and risky process but it may turn out to be an exciting way to do this. Here is one example of what I painted the last two days. It isn’t too much different from what I usually do, but still I am freeing myself mentally from what I already know or do, and let the process take me wherever it may. Here is an example of what I did in the first day of the New Year.