Art opening at Terrence Rogers Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA

Last Thursday, after a sleepless night of last-minute preparations, I drove down to Santa Monica in a u-haul loaded with five paintings (including one very large one), three watercolours, and two large charcoal drawings. It's been a hectic few weeks of finishing up my work, building frames, and attending to all the details that accompany an opening, but the work is finally on the wall at Terrence Rogers Fine Art. The show is called Equinox and includes my own work alongside paintings by my longtime friend David Molesky.

Equinox opened on the fall equinox, after a torrential thunderstorm that broke a two-year drought, and a day after the Jewish New Year. It marks the end of a cycle of work for me, and otherwise seems a fitting and portentious marker to end an old cycle and welcome in a new one.

My work for the show -- mostly narratives in settings of oceans, wetlands, and other waterways -- comes from a combination of dream imagery and re-imaginings of stories I remember from Genesis. In these works I'm interested in emotions and gestures and in the subtle tensions and interactions that occur between characters; the water itself ranges from oppressive to rejuvenating. Molesky just got back from a year working with the painter Odd Nerdrum, and his paintings, also narratives of a personal nature, have grown more subtle and refined, and have taken on the sunset-palette of the big man.

Here are some pictures from this weekend's opening (some of my paintings can be seen here):


Installing Floodplain. Gallery assistants David and Cathy, with me in the middle.


Nicole and I in front of Encounter in the Garden and Molesky's Landscape with Girl Falling off Bicycle.


Gallery owner Terry Martin with an Oscar winner (for costume design; this is LA after all) in front of my painting New World.


Nicole and Reiner in front of Lady of the Lake, a study for Floodplain.


A happy red dot next to my painting Pelican Flight.