For many years, during the time when Kim and I began Bloomer Creek Vineyard, I made studio paintings in the quiet north light of my studio on Vineyard Road. A Court for Owls led to many other small, intimate still life paintings. It was never my aim to achieve literal responses to my personal iconography – the odd assortment of balls, boxes and bits of string that I painted. Rather, it was my goal to solicit responses that were intuitive and emotional. Cool, filtered light emanated from these paintings. My minimalist palette, which suggested gun metal, with a little of the lustre of old coins and tarnished silverware, helped to organize the disparate and slightly odd objects collected in my tabletop arrangements.

In 2005 I found a set of antique toy knights at a flea market, made of lead in the 1940’s. There were seven of them – one on an armored horse and the other six were standing. After I refitted their missing plumes with bright purple and yellow feathers, these lead knights began to animate my painted “stories.” I began to fit separate panels together, abutting edges in long narrative lines. With the Passage of Time (Seemingly Unimportant Events Take on Greater Significance) - completed in 2007 – was a painting that consisted of five contiguous panels, covering a span of nine feet. Like the dusty bottles of Georgio Morandi, I did not choose to paint toy knights and the other objects I used, as forms for strict, literal interpretations. Nor did I see them as a foil for abstraction. Instead, they were somewhere in-between. To find the compelling edge between memory and dream is the crux of my painting. My toy knights suggested thoughts of “the quest” without the need to illustrate a literal story.