Artist Statement

While drawing or painting, I find that the background static, the mind’s busyness which we all share to some degree, recedes a little and opens a space for my work. In addition to my aim of documenting something significant to me, I find challenge in the use of materials, of making the final result look the way I imagine it should. But I also take advantage of the gifts the process offers all along, allowing the painting to take shape into something unexpected. Through focus and concentration, and the elimination of self-doubt, I find immense enjoyment in this fulfillment of aesthetic desire. After a few hours work, I feel rested, fresh and ready to make more.

And the more I paint, the more I understand the subjects I’m observing or thinking about. The more art I produce, the more other artists’ work appeals to and communicates to me. Thanks to them and my own work, my eye is sharpened, my spirit refreshed and I find myself on the threshold of new understandings in the immediate world. Different from most other forms of painting, watercolor is the product of an evanescent moment in time—fleeting and difficult to capture but fulfilling in its pursuit.

My choice of subjects is often determined by my expectations that I can channel the unique view, person, obsession or thing into form and light onto paper. Landscape is particularly enticing to me because in addition to offering the pleasure of being out of doors, it is where light can be at its fullest or most subtle. In watercolors, color is subsumed under the force of light, revealing a reality that is both concrete and luminous, holding an aura that draws the viewer into the world of the painting. There I hope the viewer will have a chance to “see” deeply into the texture of reality and aspects of nature.