While after they are completed I appreciate my paintings much as other viewers may – looking, apprehending: experiencing them as objects and as pictures – they are, these paintings, a side effect – almost the collateral damage – resulting from my abiding love affair with paint, the substance. As a painter, I am, first and foremost, obsessed with paint. Like the alchemists, I work in a pre-scientific, pre-technological, approximate and mysterious world. I fold metals into vegetal oils and then push pastes, maneuver viscous fluids, corral runny liquids. The stuff fascinates me – an oily slurry of crushed earth coaxed into suspension in a liquid that is the essence of plants.
Oil painting is an alchemical process wherein the substance and the painter change each other.
Thoughts on Painting
Artist’s Statement
I am concerned with beauty. I make paintings that are alive with spirit, and that lift the spirits of those who view them. Inspiration comes from my relationship with the world. My work is site specific. I paint the beach, the woods, urban gardens. I bury abstraction in representational pictures. I conjure paint into the essence and experience of the natural world from which we all spring, and by which we are all renewed. Painting I believe, is prayer; thus my work is devotional. When I focus on nature, on people, on cities, my heart fills with joy and I am inspired.
Recently I have made a slight shift in focus. Direct experience of, and reverence for, the world is still the basis for my art; however, studio painting has added a powerful layer of reflection and memory to my work. I now have the painting itself and my working in it to further inspire me – to bring me deeper into the essence of the work as it emerges from my inner core. My process of painting now runs the gamut from alla prima work through paintings which engage me in an ongoing relationship – and, at times, an ongoing struggle – for as much as six months.