Imago Foundation for the Arts
at IMAGO Gallery 36 Market Street | Warren RI
On view August 28 – October 5 | Reception Saturday, September 13, 5–8 PM | Music by Joe Parillo
IFA Exhibiting Artist
David Clarke
 Artist Statement
As a child, I lived a block away from the railroad yard; the house shook with the vibration and sound of passing freight cars. “The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll.” Both were forbidden in my house.
It was not until 1964 (in art school) that I really heard the blues. By 1967, I had experienced Jimi Hendrix live and concluded that the Fender guitar was the ultimate symbol of my generation.
I had always wanted to express that idea with my art. I finally had the chance in 2009 when I completed the installation of this sculpture on a 20-foot steel pole outside a music school. It stood there for 16 years in all kinds of weather, surviving a chainsaw attack and dry rot until I was able to rescue it.
Its current finish was inspired by Vivian Eyre, a poet and Imago community member who looked at it and suggested that I show some of the scars and damage left on this work as I transformed it into a companion piece for this exhibition. It looked burned by time. This led me to the black barstool and railroad imagery for the base. This big symbolic guitar is the engine of sound, and these paintings are the color and shape of sound.
Now, about the paintings…Since 2016, I have painted 126 abstract oil paintings, built on a simplification of lines, shapes, and marks. This has allowed me to concentrate on composition and color, the focus of my experiments. The foundation of this study is Alber’s color theory and Mondrian’s thin color line.
I am using these basic tools to create a weightless, pulsing, electric space from which new ideas emerge. This energy is either contained or released in contrasting, or similar, color combinations on the frames.​
Sound and music have also played a role in these works. I listen to music when I paint and the shapes forms and colors come to me and often depict what I would describe as the expression of an inner world where shapes and colors play against each other. Although I have been working on paintings in this style for several years now, in this most recent work, the painted linear shapes are becoming more solid yet still express the undulation of what I see as light and water as if they are being reflected in a distorted grid. My objective is to create the sensation of the painting, expanding toward the viewer, yet somehow also being contained within the frame.
Biography
David Clarke was born in Quincy, MA in 1945, grew up in Medfield, MA and graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1968. A year after graduation from RISD, he received a commission to carve a 10-foot-tall figurehead for the 149-foot recreation of the HMS Rose, a British 140-gun frigate from America’s colonial era and worked on the project in Nova Scotia, Canada. He then spent time demonstrating woodcarving at Strawberry Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

In 1975, he returned to Rhode Island and worked on a series of maritime and military-related carving projects including a figurehead for a 24-foot ship model for the Bicentennial that is now part of the Smithsonian Museum’s permanent collection; a figurehead and stern carving for the Black Pearl, a 58-foot topsail schooner, a figurehead for the schooner Cyrano, an 8-foot gold leaf, American Eagle on the stern of the yacht, Pursuit, and a life-size woodcarving of a World War I uniform and helmet draped over a chair for the 100th anniversary of the armistice of World War I. Overtime, he picked up more sign work eventually retiring from his sign business in 2020. Since then, he has focused on paintings and sculptures in his studio at his home in Bristol, Rhode Island.

IFA Spotlight Artist
Duff Schweninger
​Duff Schweninger Artist Statement
I’ve been making paintings for the past five years since moving back to Rhode Island from New York City about eight years ago. My work while living in New York consisted mainly of three-dimensional kinetic objects, graphics and video.
The latest group of paintings employs mostly color and lines as compositional elements. They are reductive works in which their parts are simplistic and direct, standing for themselves, their perceived inherent qualities and relationship to each other.
I tried to employ a somewhat random working process, while suppressing my personal aesthetic preferences, allowing them to “build themselves” as much as possible.
Duff Schweninger
Bristol, Rhode Island, 8/15/2025
Duff Schweninger, Purple Readout, acrylic on panel, 24"x48", 2025
Guest Artist Eli Portman
Eli Portman Artist Statement
I am fascinated with the concept of perception. Many experiences in my life have made me feel quite alone. In those moments, I feel unique in the way that I perceive things. And yet at the same time, I strongly believe that we as human beings share many experiences, many thoughts, feelings, and reactions.
With my work, I approach the dissonance between perceived unique individual solitude in a crowded environment, and the commonness and sameness of such feelings.
Using detailed line work and heavy colors, I illustrate moments of 'unique' isolation that we all share. The feeling of walking alone while viewing social excitement through nighttime windows, or working while others play to their contentment.
With controlled ink lines, I capture shadows and lights. Familiar angles, familiar feelings brought on by time of day or night, placement and presence in one’s environment. I manipulate the openness and tightness of visual spaces and interiors to reflect the claustrophobia of society's open space and the endless emptiness of being crowded and crushed.
Image Above:
Eli Portman, Late Night Ice Cream Truck
Pen and Ink, Watercolor
With strong colors, I attract the viewer’s eyes to specific spaces within the composition, reminding them of their own perceptions of environment, and that I, like them, find myself in there too. By capturing these scenes, I present the commonality between them and me. Though they do not know me, we are united by the sameness of the humanity we all share.
The art exhibitions that affect me most strongly are the ones that remind me of myself. Of what I love, of what I find beautiful, and of what I fear. We are always looking for a certain degree of reflections of ourselves. In images, in friends, in pets, in communities, in romantic partners. With my artwork, I attempt to bridge the gaps of solitude by harnessing that innate search for our reflections. With familiar scenes, bright colors, and fine details of everyday objects and structures, I create scenes that are familiar in their individuality.
Biography
Eli Portman was born and raised in the Greater Boston area. He graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton with a Bachelors Degree in studio art in the spring of 2014.
​Portman has created murals and custom artwork for Starbucks, Walmart, General Electric, Salem State University, the Punto Urban Art Museum, the Downtown Boston BID and the City of Boston, and displayed his work in the Fountain Street Gallery, the Selfless Art Gallery, The Torosiete Gallery, the Umass Boston Harbor Arts Gallery, the Spring Bull Gallery, and more. He is a member of the Copley Society of Art, and regularly has his illustrations published in various media. In 2019 he was an Artist Fellow at the Boston Athenaeum. In 2024 he worked with the Boston “Auschwitz Exhibit”, a traveling holocaust museum, to create the largest watercolor painting in the world.
IFA Exhibiting Artists
