"I painted these large tropical seascapes and landscapes in in the studio when I returned to New York City after years of living in the Caribbean. My body may have been in New York, but my thoughts and dreams lagged behind. Doing these paintings of Jamaica enabled me to relive the experience of being stranded on a remote tropical island, the same Robinson Crusoe / Swiss Family Robinson fantasy that captivated me as a child. I think a lot of people would like to at least briefly be shipwrecked on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, away from the complexity of civilization. Negril in the late 1970s was countrified, pristinely beautiful, and poverty stricken. Now it's much more developed and overbuilt with hotels and spas. I'm grateful that I got to experience the simple life in such a lush, unspoiled, near-jungle environment, with its endless beaches and coral rock cliffs lining the seacoast. I haven't been back to Jamaica since December 1980, but now I'm a sucker for any TV show set on an island: Survivor, Lost, you name it. I'm hooked and I'm there—right back on the island paradise in my mind.

The tropical oil paintings on this page's online fine art gallery / slide show are:

1. Auspicious Sunbeams I (a strange and beautiful confluence of natural phenomena)
2. Spring Dawn (morning mist in the sunlight)
3. Coconut Cove in Pirate Days (I imagined the coastline swept clean of hotels, as it was in the 1700s)
4. The Sunlit Path (my back yard in Jamaica, painted under the influence of Gauguin)
5. Cathedral Rocks (the one seacoast painting that's not in Jamaica; this rock formation was on the Bermuda coast)
6. Chasm (coral rock formations along the coastline of Negril's West End)
7. Autumn Seagrape Trees (I loved everything about these trees: their sinuous trunks and limbs that reach for the sky, the rounded leaves and sweet fuzz-covered fruit; seagrapes appear in many of my paintings)
8. Auspicious Sunbeams II (another cloud and sun arrangement that seemed to have cosmic portent)
9. The Arousing (Shock, Thunder) (an illustration of I Ching hexagram number 51)
11. Trees in a Storm (I sketched these trees during a rainstorm, somewhere along Negril's 7-mile beach. They appeared to be dancing. The sketch became a watercolor, then this large oil painting.)
11. The Swans That Came to the Lake (I stole the title from Rick Fields's book.)
12. Lagoon (a wall-size oil painting that took months to complete)

Please refer to the price list to determine which paintings are for sale or have already been sold.

(Keywords: artists who paint tropical seascapes and landscapes, artists who paint Jamaican seascapes and landscapes.)