I grew up in California, in Del Mar just north of La Jolla and San Diego, and then in Los Angeles. I attended UCLA. I studied painting in college and then studied further to develop a painting language. I studied classic renaissance underpainting and glazing, texture and form.
Then for 21 years I stopped painting. I wrote, I photographed, I learned cabinetmaking and woodworking, I designed structures. But I did not paint. In 2003 I began again. I found a clear painting language.
In 2006, my daughter asked me for a painting. At that time I was living on the East Coast of the United States, and she was still living in California. I asked her to take photos of a classic California Pacific sunset, from which to paint for her.
She did not send the photographs. I found some images in photographs and in my memories from growing up along the California coast, and in the beginnings of a dark New England autumn, I painted \\\"Sunset #1 | La Jolla\\\". I gave it t
her in 2008.
Painting that first sunset rekindled my memory of color and light, of sunset and of warmth that I grew up with. I painted that sunset through a fall and winter that was very dark and cold. I remembered and felt a warm sun and a bright evening light, a golden cast to everything, that pushed away the cold.
I painted a second sunset. I learned more about the language of light and more about how light behaves in acrylic paint. I saw a series of perhaps 104 paintings, and today I have outlines for 42 of those beyond what I\\\'ve completed.
Time moved forward. My daughter was admitted to a hospital in California, diagnosed with leukemia. She fell into respiratory failure and an induced coma. I spent 42 days, six weeks by her bed from 5 AM to 3 in the afternoon. I spoke with her, I told her how much I loved her. I left the horror of beeping and alarms, monitors and the dread of losing her. I walked along the ocean and took thousands of pictures as the sun dropped behind the horizon.
She came out of the coma, still with cancer, but breathing again on her own. I painted more sunsets, from those images I gathered while she was asleep. She fought hard, but the cancer drifted into her brain. In a November, I came out to see her, one of many trips. She was out of the hospital for a couple of weeks, and she and I walked along the coast, taking photographs together, driving around and talking, going through her childhood memories. That was the last time I would spend time with her outside of the hospital.
On her death, I downloaded all the photographs from her iPhone, including the ones we had taken together of the coast. Sunsets #16 and #17 are from her photos, Sunset #18 was from walking with her, and all of these are intertwined and in memory of my first child, who is both with me and apart from me forever.
These paintings are of the warmth and the love of light.
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