Musings

Artist's Statement :

These paintings are evidence of my long struggle to see, of striving to put
down, in oil paint on canvas, all of the recurring visions that take me into reverie.
After years of searching for my deepest artistic "fathers," I began to draw the most
profound inspiration from the aching and exhilarating light of Hopper and
Vermeer, the tactile, loose - limbed- yet- architectural , wildness of Bonnard, and
the geometric, austere, and searching poetry of Mark Rothko. There is something
so vital, and generous, about recreating imaginative spaces, interiors, and objects
in the light of the everyday..... or in the mysterious realms of dusk, dawn, and the
violet-blue nighttime.

"Sculpting " the mass of forms, using traditional concepts of underpainting,
highlights, half-tones, and shadows, feels like a way of "nailing down" the
ephemeral... of creating, as the artist Ross Neher says, "something of lasting
consequence and durability." So the hope, then, is that paintings such as these can serve a function, to offer palpable energizing evidence of the invisible...
the magical, and reflect the light that "shines in the darkness.”



To Waken a Small Person

You sleep at the top of streets
Up which workmen each morning
Go wheeling their bicycles

Your eyes are like the windows
Of some high attic the one
The very one you sleep in

They're shut it's raining the rain
Falls on the streets of the town
As it falls falls through your sleep

You must be dreaming these tears
Wake up please open yourself
Like a little umbrella

Hurry the sidewalks need you
The awnings not one is up
And the patient bicycles

Halted at intersections
They need you they are confused
The colors ot traffic lights

Are bleeding bleeding wake up
The puddles of parking lots
Cannot contain such rainbows

(By Donald Justice)