"Ice blue silver sky fades into grey, to a grey hope that omens to be: starless and bible black."
July-August, 1975
Egg Tempera on Panel; 14 x 20"

This was a strange marriage of my interest in Andrew Wyeth's and Robert Vickery's tempera painting techniques with my fascination with the late 19th Century Symbolist and Decadent movements in European art. The images were gathered from other, earlier works, some of which you can see on this web site in preliminary sketches - the beech/buttonwood tree from a gouache/watercolor called "After", the self portrait in an Army winter coat from another egg tempera painting called "Poor Charley Midwich", and the sketch of the hand from a life-size oil painting of the Angel of Death. This particular painting was shown in the Student juried Spring Exhibition in 1976, received an Honorable Mention, and was probably one of the first egg tempera paintings SUNY New Paltz had ever seen, from an undergraduate, anyway. The painting was later sold to a private collector in Hyde Park, NY.

The dubious quality of the image can be attributed to the fact that it was scanned from a 35mm slide taken in my parent's backyard in full sunlight with a 1970s-era Canon SLR camera with manual focus.

The title is a quote from a song called "Starless" from a great album called "Red" by King Crimson - Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Cross, even a bit of McDonald on alto sax....