ARTIST STATEMENT

A native urge to create that began when I was a child has marked the way I have lived my life. As I embraced the gamut of responsibilities that come with family and professional life, insights fashioned over the years informed in parallel the fabric of both my career and canvas.

Living close to, in and with the land, I have felt a profound resonance in simple landscapes, sensing something more, something transcendent that is in them. I return time and again to scenes that I have lived with and known well, conscious of a dimension that goes beyond the surface, searching for those deeper places where I am trying to take myself.

I like to focus on a subject so that its attachment to a pedestrian world disolves and I can extract a fundamental element, relinquish the need for a literal context and conjure more out of the object than is evident to the natural eye. My span of attention moves from the prosaic descriptive to where my heart lies in an effort to distill the poetic essence of a thing. A passion for simple things causes me to return to the same subject over and over again, a process of reduction in which I hope to find what it means, not merely what it is.

In my landscape paintings I hope to communicate the ethereal quality of a scene. Often I am drawn to the harshest time of year, when the lush colors and wild exuberance of growing seasons are gone and I can see the bones of the earth, when at times the gift if a light blanket of snow softens the edges of the world and makes it beautiful. Winter invites contemplation so I can concentrate my attention on the essence of a feature in the landscape and find the spiritual eminence in what I see.