Illusion, whether the medium is paint or photography, is a powerful lens to reality - revealing truths about the artist, the viewer, the world that contains both. Wilderness or its urban fragments draw me in. I want to capture, in empirical rather than romantic form, the truth of what I see and how I see it. My paintings describe the season and time of day, as well as terrain and vegetation. I wish to deepen more than heighten the sensations created by looking at a painting; I want to pull the viewer more intimately into the picture plane. I hope to create paintings that achieve a striking optical immediacy and reveal a supple painterly navigation between representation and abstraction; sense and nonsense.
I must emphasize that these paintings are started and completed entirely on site, without reference to photographs or preliminary sketches. I paint in gouache, a medium of remarkable fluency, which allows me to balance pictorial clarity with subtle tonal contrasts. The sense of encompassing space is created by eliminating commonplace references to scale such as people, animals, roads, or buildings, and by avoiding or minimizing a dominant focus in the composition. The emphasis is often on transient phenomena produced by light: shadows, reflections, tranparencies, cast color, and halation. The goal is to find multiple or overlapping picture planes, rather than more distance-based, or simplified compositions, in order to challenge traditional landscape painting conventions related to scale, perspective, depth, and proximity.
And last - I want to contribute to a visual archive of our world. Our environment is being degraded at its edges as well as its core by escalating human activity. Photographers have dedicated themselves to documenting the alteration and deterioration of the landscape. I hope my paintings serve as a record of the solitude and beauty of the diminishing wilderness under our domain.