Three paintings in progress

Concrete Plant [modula id=”1487″] Maspeth Creek Winter [modula id=”1501″] Plank Road [modula id=”1526″]

Low Tide – closeup on Newtown Creek

[siteorigin_widget class=”WP_Widget_Media_Image”][/siteorigin_widget] From time to time when I’m painting and exploring at Newtown Creek, I will point my camera down to the water. Low tide reveals much more than mud. Newtown Creek has been a dumping ground for anything imaginable for 200 years. The larger visible items are varied, broken and random. What variety of […]

Tonal Studies

I’m getting ready to start my larger paintings, buying paper and paints and new brushes. In the meantime, I’ve been working on some quick studies of landscape views that I captured in plein air paintings or photos. Here are ten tonal studies, quick sketches meant explore possible larger compositions. For color I used only burnt […]

Studio Painting – Plank Road

The paintings I’m making for my project Recovered Landscapes: Newtown Creek will be large. I’m used to painting watercolors on-site, making quick small sketches that capture a lot of immediacy. Returning to the studio however, allows me to paint on an expanded scale. The challenge is to maintain the energy in the work. Here is a medium-scale […]

English Kills at Morgan Ave.

As Newtown Creek twists and meanders through the industrial area on the border of Queens and Brooklyn, it gradually becomes narrower and more still. The farthest reach of the creek ends entirely in Brooklyn, near the bustling, trendy area of Bushwick at Morgan Avenue. At this point the creeks is a murky, haunting body of […]

Exploring Newtown Creek

I am drawn to painting the places where nature and human development meet, and so the urban landscapes of New York City are especially interesting to me. After 5 years of living in Queens, following 25 years in Brooklyn, I finally ventured to the borderland between those two boroughs, the neglected brownfields and polluted waters […]