Artist Statement

The impulse to draw and paint begins for most everyone in childhood. For me, becoming intentional about artmaking happened somewhere along the bumble into adulthood and latched on for the ride.  The process typically starts out as an intuitive response to a place, and once the first forms take on color and shape, the painting becomes a problem to solve.  Reinterpreting the places in which I reside or visit is a way for me to commit these places to memory – not as they are but how I prefer to remember them. Photographs are a useful tool for this purpose but painting allows me to omit, alter, or enhance something in my view-scape that is out of the ordinary – a signal tree or a backlit forest or a crooked ridge. These places do not appear in my paintings as they do in situ, but as impressions after the colors and marks begin to inform one another. My work sometimes suggests the presence of people, either through an abandoned barn or a cultivated landscape. The exclusion of the figure from my work is not a philosophical decision but rather an acknowledgement that I do not know how to reimagine people.

What I enjoy most about sharing my paintings with friends and people who are not familiar to me is the commonality that ensues. Someone else who may not see what I see or have the inclination to translate a place in paint is pleased by -- or curious about my interpretation, and that becomes a shared experience. The exchange may only last a few seconds but what is life if not fleeting.  

Painting is a way of life -- but in order to help support my family and pursue my lifestyle choices to travel, garden, cycle, ski, paddle and hike -- I have maintained a professional career spanning 40 years as an arts administrator and fundraising consultant.