Introduction

If I could paint all the time, I would, but my conscience would bother me.  My compromise will be to use this site not only for paintings, but to display an integration of art and politics.  When art and politics meet, art more often loses.  I have usually tried to keep them separate myself but simply cannot always, nor should I.

When I began to paint at 50, I had already started on several decades of work with refugee survivors of torture.  At that time, I was pleased to see no evidence of my work in my painting; for a while it was undoubtedly an escape.  I am a colorist, I favor the Fauves, the Expressionists, the Canadian Group of Seven, the California Society of Six.  My work was often dark.

After two decades in the work, I saw that unconsciously it leaked into some paintings (as with "Self-Portrait of the Artist at the End of the Twentieth Century"), or more rarely is explicit (as in "Homage to Lissitsky").  I also forged an even closer and constant marriage between art and politics as an editor of the literary journal "americas review", where I was usually in charge of the cover and interior art.

Even so, as a painter I have consciously tried to adhere to doing art first and foremost-- the attempt to preserve beauty, which surely is one of the goals in achieving justice. Without justice, art is banned and books are burned. 

So, if there is beauty here, I intend it freely for you who see it, and for the survivors of war it may benefit, and for myself in my own need, whether to rest or to be active.