1980s Watercolors

During the first half of the 1980s I was living in Boston, studying music and painting. Joan and I had moved from 68 Broad Street to another downtown studio, 24 Lincoln Street in the South Station area. There was a lot of urban renewal going on during those years and artists could inhabit reasonably priced lofts as long as they didn't mind being evicted more or less without notice.

During this time I re-discovered watercolors, which I had used off and on since elementary school. I also discovered the sensory thrill of painting outdoors. We made numerous trips to Florida, Vermont, and Cape Cod, among other places. Some in this collection are interiors of our Lincoln Street studio. Many of the paintings of this era remain among my favorites in this medium. In 1985 - after living in Boston for seventeen years - we moved to southern Colorado to manage a rural retreat center. Many of these watercolors were done in 1984, our last full year of living in the moist, luminous air of the American east coast. See the Portfolio page above for another section of this site called “Colorado”, which shows the geographic and aesthetic shift.