My work is informed and influenced by my observations of the natural world and having lived on a variety of continents amid different cultures. In the abstracted, internalized landscapes of my work, each painting helps to record the experience or sense of place and traces my passage through it. A personal language of markings and patterns repeated across a richly colored canvas is pulled from both nature and symbols borrowed from various cultures. My observations of a constantly changing environment are referenced in the forms and nuances of light, a balancing of disorder with order through the complexity of pattern and mark making, drawing and manipulating paint on the surface of the canvas make up the structure in my canvases.

In my travels across the country twice a year I am aware of an increasing sense of noise in signs, graffiti and urban sprawl encroaching
upon pastoral landscapes. The context of the paintings have grown beyond the focus of the grounded landscape to include an awareness of an urban influence thrust upon and integrated into the structured forms of the expansive rural fields that I am inspired by. As it has evolved, my practice has grown to absorb contexts beyond narrow definitions of “landscape” and “nature.” The landscape is the spiritual anchor; the travel has become the new awareness in the dynamic of the dialogue in the painting. My yearly immersion within the rural environment makes me more aware of the subtle changes affected on my surroundings; the smell of newly tilled rich black earth, weather variations affecting growing patterns and bird and insect populations, the flow of water changing the course of a local stream, a new construction development bringing light to affect my vision of the night sky. This palpable energy of the land, quiet on top, pulsating beneath growing fields, stirs my imagination into conveying these observations onto the canvas. I am aware of a sense of my own physicality within the space of time, seeing and memory. This becomes an amalgamation of memories of shifting landscapes, urban mixed up with rural, a physical balance between the harmony and chaos, all melding together into a complex tapestry of images. My paintings are not specific to a place or time but are visceral responses to my immediate and memorized environments.

Opening Reception

February 3, 2017

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Free to the public with refreshments and artist talk