As I have said earlier I have been drawing and painting for most of my life.

I remember later, when I was painting and studying a lot of Dali's paintings, I used a magnifying glass to study their texture and noticed that they ---the better part of them that is, --- seemed incredibly smooth. I was perplexed. Canvas was grainy with tiny mesh marks. I remember asking Mr. Feldman how the effect was achieved and he told me about gesso and how the canvas could be painted and once dry, sanded and then gessoed again. This could be built up until the surface was absolutely smooth.

By the end of the seventies I had begun exploring more of a self expressive divisiveness---exploration of color and form. I read Jose Albert's INTERACTION OF COLOR because my friend , Richard Burke, a painter I had befriended, ten years my senior had written me in a letter that he had begun studying the work, and that with it he had been attempting: "trying to make one color look like another." The whole idea intrigued me so I went out and bought the book. Richard was a great help in my past and like most things, you don't realize them until they've gone. I haven't seen Richard since 1979...I did a portrait of him, PORTRAIT OF RICHARD, that year and have it still. He never did get to see the work, but I know he'd like it. He'd find it, I'm sure, a lot more malleable than my surrealism or Fantasy work which he never so much as commented on, other than to say a particular painting was 'wild', or whatever colloquialism was popular at the moment. He was an incredible help he to me without being any more than a drinking buddy. Richard was an even more incredible painter and, I hope, is still painting.

I've never struggled to perfect any one style, preferring the purity of what ever came out to something that was structured the same way each time; from sketch to under painting to filling in the blanks so to speak.

However, this created havoc for two reasons: constant battle over which is purer,---these self-critical rituals forever being burdened by the opinions of the masses, those, let's say, who'd prefer Winslow Homer to Pollack and vice versa and, unknowingly at the time, one does not realize that eventually ALL marks made by a "mark maker" become recognizable as HIS marks and no one else. So, it was the aggravation of not knowing which of my marks were successful which most aggravated me to madness.
Geometricity filled the eighties.

In the 80's, I began woodworking and cabinet making, becoming an apprentice to a couple of cabinet makers who happened to drink in the same bar that I did. Both these men, Ed and Ted, were artists who had attended the Tyler school of art. A lot of my work between 1980 and 1984 was greatly influenced by them and the Russian constructivists; Lissitzky, Malievich, Rodchencko, and it was not so much the anthem, or, manifesto these artists preached (in the same way the Dutch Destijl wrote, spoke and documented) with their subjectless art that made me symbiotic with them, it was merely the harmonization of color that sucked me in and swallowed me whole. Even still,WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE? is a painting I did in 1983 in the shop where I was working as a wood finisher's apprentice. The piece was rendered on an oak cut out for a back bar which had been white washed. The title pretty much sums up my preoccupation with the confusion of life in general.

To most, jumbled colored spaces on a canvas relay nothing more than "colored blocks on an area"(Hoffman, certainly, Mondrian--- especially his "BROADWAY BOOGIE WOOGIE". To me these colors vibrated and sang to me in the same way I could follow the lines of a Rembrandt, or Da Vinci...investigating the blending of flesh tones, the folds of shimmering satin, or the meticulousness of light glaring from a shoulder shield or helmet ("The Man in the Golden Helmet's" helmet for instance.) The organizational colored areas of Hans Hoffman, Mondrian, and later, Rothko inspired me and gave me a better understanding of what "ART"---no, more,--- what expression and the divination of a human being's need to express was clearly all about. RED, LANDSCAPE, HOT AUGUST DAY, and WHITE GRID, can be juxtaposed with, say, CITYSCAPE, JOSE, CHILD WITH HAMMER, and ICEWORLD, where subject became more definitively outlined, yet for me, they rely only on the ability of the seer to extrapolate their values. This act and ability was not about replicating other artists' work. I do not think that to be influenced is copying or "replicating"---to copy is to copy. Plain and simple. However, to be moved by an artist's or many artists' work,--- to feast with the eyes, to digest and swallow is to be provoked without reservation and made,---indeed, forced to create. This was the cause. To work on one's art is a talentless venture, for mere talent is not what art is about. Talent can prescribe the way to create and describe the methods and technics of various painting mediums and materials etc, but to create is to live; to be able to do nothing more than what the soul demands...to make marks and images with line and paint because one has to and there is no other choice. The act of painting lives as response to an emotion...as easily as opening one's eyes...a functioning of the entire system as a means of communication...the language of the soul's need to make its existence known...intuitive...instinctual...it is an ability that is born within and dies if not nurtured; not only by those influences through which we are guided but, more importantly, by THE SELF.

As I entered the nineties with the same frame of mind and same plausible outcome. Work would tend towards abstraction but retain a subjective whole: THREE WOMAN SMOKING, THE MISSION, SELF PORTRAIT WITH CIGARETTE, STRANGE EVENING, and DARK WATERS, These works are readily recognizable as such, while THE OLD FACTORY, is oblique and mysterious: Does the dark balance the light or the light balance the dark? The question is the subject.

The nineties begin to ebb, the birthing of new work having begun with ANGEL EYES, being a rendition of my future wife, Heidi, which I did from memory five days after I had met her in Ottawa, Canada, in the lobby of a hotel where I was staying as a, ahem... "furniture guy". She, and she alone rekindled in me the fire that had burned and had been extinguished by the affair before which I had captured in all its contorted pain and anguish with TRAPPED,. Consequently, she has become my favorite model and subject: THE LEMON LADY, MY LOVE, THE EMBRACE, PASSION, ...my love for her, at last equaling my love for painting, which I had always believed to be an impossibility.

So, you see, I am eternally grateful to whatever gracious wind it was that blew us both together, proving once and for all, the old saying: Good things come to those who wait.

In art - as in life - if one must wait, I'm glad I can paint.

Best wishes,
Joe L'Erario