statement

I'm both a writer and a painter, and have made my living mostly as a writer. Since I began exhibiting more extensively in 2008, painting has served as a more significant collateral source of income. I began painting in my teens, and ever since it has been as important to me as writing as a way of establishing order and meaning in my life.

Painting, for me, is a non-conceptual way of apprehending life. It's a philosophical stance as much as an aesthetic pursuit. In the process of making a representation of something, the world becomes a part of me, and vice versa, in a way that reasoning about he world can't achieve. Painting requires me to pay dispassionate, sustained attention to the way things are without any motive other than to be aware of them and share that awareness through paint. For me, this kind of mindfulness is entirely different from knowledge and intelligence. Painting isn't about thinking or knowing. It's about seeing what's there, nothing more, but when it works it conveys more than what's immediately visible. A good painting offers the viewer, subconsciously, a glimpse of a whole world, not information about some small part of it.

bio

born: 1953, Decatur, Illinois

education

University of Rochester, BA 1975

University of Illinois, MA, 1978

University of Illinois, MS, 1979

selected awards/honors

Alice E, Koret Award, Memorial Art Gallery

First Place, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art

K.I. McKenna Award, Woodstock School of Art

Award for Excellent, Xavier University

selected publications

High, Manifest, 2013

International Painting Annual, Manifest, 2012

Paint, Manifest, v43

selected solo or two-person exhibits

David Dorsey and Brian O'Neill, Oxford Gallery, 2012

selected group shows

Butler Midyear, Butler Institute of Art, 2012

Halpert Biennial, 2009 and 2011

Persona Pop-Up, London, 2011

Memorial Art Gallery, 62nd and 64th Finger Lakes Exhibitions