The first time I came across a photo of Beethoven’s death mask, I was so struck by the brutal beauty and fullness of feature, I felt I had no choice but to try to capture the same intensity in my own work. As a classically trained composer, as well as a painter, the affinity I’ve long felt for Beethoven only reinforced the impact of his death mask on my imagination. In this series of paintings, collectively titled “Beethoven Death Mask Variations,” I have tried to create a tumultuous symphony of contrasting themes that visually mirror the immortal composer’s own compositional techniques. Thus, the canvas – sometimes the paper – becomes a battlefield of peaks and valleys, light and darkness, warms and cools, solidity and dissolution, representation and abstraction, life and death. To achieve more of a transcendental quality in painting, I chose a medium that would not appear as painting but as a phenomenon of nature. The strength and flexibility of acrylic emulsions allow me to create rough topographical textures not achievable with traditional media. Use of abrasive fillers, such as volcanic rock, marble dust, ash, and other archival mortars help give the paintings a stone-like feel. The craggy stone effects, coupled with the enormous size of these canvasses and emphasis on form, place the work somewhere between sculpture and painting. The subtractive processes of sanding and scraping further enhance those effects. With knives, razors, steel wool, sandpaper and solvents, I reveal the previous layers of the painting much as an archeologist reveals the earth’s buried secrets. Although “The Beethoven Death Mask Variations” seem to have a heavy emphasis on death and decay, they are really proclamations of renewal and endurance. As tortured and distressed as the features may appear, Beethoven still emerges from the debris as solid and as stone-like as Egypt’s Sphinx. In an entirely different vein, I’ve set myself the challenge of painting broad landscapes in a small format. Often limiting myself to surfaces as small as 10 x 16 inches, I’ve produced 16 such pieces in another Beethoven-inspired body of work collectively titled “Pastorale Suite” and numbered I through XVI. While the landscapes depicted don’t refer directly to specific passages in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the paintings do owe much of their emotional range and palette to the music’s effects on me. These small paintings have, in turn, led to an ongoing series of larger landscapes, titled “Worked Earth,” whose scale echoes the symphonic reach of wide, often mountainous vistas.