I was honored to be one of a handful of recent resident colony artists asked to show images of their works as part of the program for the annual MacDowell Colony National benefit in New York City at 7 World Trade Center. Jane Alexander was being honored for her outstanding contributions and service as an advocate for the arts.
Five of my new NH on-site paintings completed during my fall 2008 residency. Each painting is 60″ x 48″
“Hyperbolic Nature: Between Birches” (NH) 60″ x 48″, 2008
After the great strides I made with my works during my too-short, one-month, fall residency at MacDowell in 2006 I was determined to return to take up where I left off. In that short but highly productive residency, I was able to increase the intensity and variety of the color palette I could use due to the spectacular fall foliage and was able to extend the act of painting to a full-day’s length which allowed the process of applying paint to become a performative act. I was also able to successfully increase the scale of my final works to 60″ x 48″ and now I wanted to make an entire series of these larger paintings that would use the fall palette. Luckily I was able to do just that, in part because I was granted my first sabbatical in the fall of 2008 and I was simultaneous accepted back to the MacDowell Colony that fall.
“Hyperbolic Nature” Red Maples Turning” (NH) 60″ x 48″ in the Tony Goldman collection, NYC
“Reds Square Greens” (NH) diptych 48″ x 84″. Private Collection South America
DETAIL of “Reds Square Greens” (NH)
In 2008 I was awarded a highly competitive STATE OF FLORIDA INDIVIDUAL ARTIST FELLOWSHIP which came with a $5000 award. You can see my profile and read more about this program by going to the Division Of Cultural Affair’s link below.
“Mossy Greens & Cool Lavenders” (WA) diptych 48″ x 72″, 2007
The Encounters series of solo exhibitions at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, AL, is designed to highlight outstanding regional contemporary art and they are organized by Peter J. Baldaia, the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the museum. I was invited to be part of this series after my 5’ X 12’ triptych titled Fall Paths (NH) was awarded First Place by the juror and also won the People’s Choice Award from the general audience at the museum’s Red Clay Survey show in 2007. This was the first time in the show’s long history that both awards had been given to the same work. My work turned out to so popular that the director invited me to have a solo show the following year. The main gallery was very large and the back space lent itself to be configured into an installation space so over the course of the year, I was able to create a my largest installation to date: fifteen on-site Florida paintings (each 60″H X 48″W) that I titled the Hyperbolic Nature: Northern Florida Series for the museum. Below are some images from that show but more can be seen on on web page under “Gallery Views”.
“Hyperbolic Nature: Waters” (FL) 48″ x 60″, private collection Texas
The image below is of the painting that the museum purchased for their permanent collection. The work was created on-site in Paint Rock, AL, just north of Huntsville, during my week-ling working visit to a private 3000 acre nature and hunting conservation area in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains that the museum’s staff was able to arrange for me. The link below will down load a 6.6 MB pdf file of the Huntsville Museum’s Encounters catalog that contains an extensive Q&A essay conducted by Peter Baldaia.
“Painted Paint Rock” (AL) diptych, 2008. Permanent Collection of the Huntsville Museum of Art.
New versions of A Mysterious Clarity kept being requested in 2008 we showed at the Brevard Museum in Melbourne, FL but in May-July we had the biggest version yet at The Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, FL . I thought it was the best version of the show so far, in large part because of the beautiful, large space that let the works breath and flow like they had never been able to before. Below are some images from that show but I have more on on webpage under “Gallery Views” 
Below is a small pdf of the brochure the Gulf Coast Museum of Art produced for the exhibition.
The More Is More: Maximalist tendencies in Contemporary Painting show that opened at the FSU Museum in 2007 had a wonderful 64 page catalog that included a curatorial essay by the curator, Tatiana Flores, and this catalog somehow made its way into the hands of an Italian gallery director named Masha at Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy. She invited a 5 of the artists in the original show to exhibit a new version of that exhibition in her space.
“The group of artists in “More is More” that is on exhibit at Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy (from May 9 to July 26, 2008) share in a “maximalist” dialog that allows them to mix and mash different styles and images in ways that create a nonlinear look and reading of their works.All these artists employ seemingly contradictory approaches to image making in order to convey a type of post-modern truth and vision in their works. They incorporate elements of the art of the past with those of the present, look to the West and East, try to overcome boundaries between high and low culture, between text and image and even try to reconcile representation with abstraction in a single work.
The works of Lilian Garcia-Roig, James Barsness, Clayton Brothers, Mark Messersmith and Grant Miller, therefore, are characterized by a taste for excess in both image, reading and materials, the overhead of composition that emphasizes the exuberance of the narrative, passionate gestural strokes. Each of these maximalist paintings demands the utmost attention from the viewer, as they sweep us from surfaces to surface, each so full of images, paint and narratives, that we left speechless.”-Italian Press
“Yellow Flows” (WA) 48″ x 36″, 2007, private collection Italy
DETAIL of “Yellow Flows” middle left section
“Devil’s Club Highlight” (WA) 60″ x 48″, 2006, private collection Texas
Into the Woods was the title of a solo show of recent groupings of WA, FL, NH & TX on-site paintings that opened at the Grace Museum in Abilene, TX in July and then traveled to the Michelson Museum in Marshall, TX in September. You can see some images from that show from the Grace Museum on my webpage under “Gallery Views”.
Carol Jazzar showed my recent FL paintings at Bridge fair during Miami Beach Art Basel fair week.
Cumulative Nature: Orange Lavender” 48″ x 36″, 2007. Private Collection Texas
“Cumulative Nature: Sept. 15″ (FL) 48″ x 36”, 2007. Private collection NYC
My works were selected again for inclusion in New American Paintings! Peter Boswell, the senior curator at the Miami Art Museum, was the juror NAP #76 (souther region) in June/July 2008. He specifically commented “on how I use the tactility of the paint medium to create tension between the materiality of my means and the three-demensionality of my imagery”. My works are found on pages 76-79.
Volume 13, Issue 3, ISSN 1066-2235
