About the artist

My mother was an artist, and my father used art daily in his work. They were not surprised when, as a child, I began showing sparks of creativity (see the drawing "Toys Boys Like," which I drew at age five). This creativity occasioned almost constant disagreement with my art teachers in Junior High School, since I insisted on adding my own adaptations to each assigned art project.

Now I feel free to create without constraint.

For this website, I've collected examples of several of my artistic projects, beginning with line drawings and pastels. I liked working with a fine-tipped pen, and I felt comfortable incorporating both the surreal and also elements of anatomy

into my drawings. The skeleton tugging at muscles is saying, "Read The Big Book," which was the daily admonishment from my Anatomy professor in medical school. The tipsy house ("49 Bennet Street") was a North Boston address used around 1962 as a neighborhood clinic. The paired eyes ended up on paper eight years before I considered becoming an ophthalmologist. 

Between 1979 and 2015 I was immersed in the (painfully slow) creation of Cluster Constructions: three-dimensional assemblages of photos and wood. Using images of buildings, storefronts, signs and vehicles, I depicted recognizable areas such as Harvard Square, Kona (Hawaii) and Rehoboth Beach (Delaware).

The painted rocks developed from a whim around 2010. The river-polished rocks in the shallows of my pond begged to have images painted on them. So I used my acrylic paint with fine brushes to bring life to renderings of hearts, owls, beetles, high heel shoes and even hotdogs. 

Around 2013 I convinced myself that I could paint flat surfaces to look three-dimensional. Designing these trompe l'oeil projects involved using perfect perspective, for I discovered that if my lines were off by only a couple of degrees, the subject would not look multidimensional. My favorites among these are the Irish cabinet,

complete with realistic wood grain, the open door with a seascape and the ones with intersecting planes.

More recently, I have experimented with adding a variety of chemicals to liquid acrylic paint. When dripped onto canvas, these mixtures create expanding cellular patterns that cannot be achieved by using a brush. 

I've also been working with scenic watercolors and acrylics. I can't resist flower-draped doorways of European country houses or the canals of Venice.

Watch this site for more!

- Bob