Artist's Statement:
The space I was painting in this winter was an apartment above the Plane Space, which is the gallery that represents me in New York City. The owners of the gallery let me use the space (on condition that I keep them supplied with Geary's Ale) because my Rockland studio was under construction. The space depicted on both sides of the rudder represents that space, and the objects in the space. As far as I can remember I've never worked on a shaped painting, so this was a strange project for me, but it was interesting. When I got the rudder it has a red and white color scheme, which were my school colors (Camden/Rockport. Sorry Rockland.) and also are the colors of the Van Halen album "Diver Down", which my New York gallerist gave me the day I moved into the space above Plane Space Gallery this winter. On the reverse side of the rudder is a close up of the floor space, upon which I had a chart of Penobscot Bay, in the middle of which is Little Bermuda. Little Bermuda is a small but significant rock between Lime Island and Job, which a friend and I became intimately acquainted with in September. I would like to humbly thank, once again, the crews of the Rockland and Cape Cod Coast Guard stations and the Harbor Patrol for their assistance that night.