Air Paintings

What's an Air Painting? And why?

Air paintings are painted on multiple sheets of plexiglass, and give the appearance of the pigment floating in space.

The answer to "Why?" is a little longer. When you start out writing poetry as I did, you soon realize that almost nobody reads or buys poetry anymore. We have moved to a more visual world. In New York in the Sixties, I started putting poems on sheets of plexiglass so that they became physical objects that confronted you and could be read in different ways. And being married to a landscape artist got me interested in painting, which was much more sensual and physically engaging. So I switched to painting on canvas and paper.

But ideas about plexiglass continued to intrigue me. It's a material that has fascinated me since a high school shop teacher gave me a emerald piece of plexiglass and showed me how to heat and shape it. It's a magical material,  transparent, almost unbreakable, can be polished and machined into sparkling pieces, and you can paint on it. 

So now I paint landscapes that float on this ethereal surface, trying to use both sides of the acrylic panels to give a sense of the transparency and elusiveness of life.