Artist Statement

For the bulk of my career I have been best known as a landscape painter. For me, this arose more out of a love of being outdoors, than from a love of landscape painting as a genre. My true love has always been abstract painting, both as a viewer and as a maker.

My latest abstract work still reflects my love of the natural world, just not as literally as my landscape paintings did. The paintings I make now represent a collection of feelings and sensations condensed and compressed into what I hope results in a striking visual experience with a powerful sense of place.

To illustrate what I mean…

I recently made a painting of Lake Baikal. In making the painting, just as important as my visual memory of the lake itself in all its astonishing beauty, was my memory of the five-day journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad it took to get there. I remember sitting at the table in my sleeper car watching, mesmerized, as a pack of steppe wolves ran through the tall blue-green grass while I drank steaming hot tea from a glass.

I understand that you will not see the things I just described when you look at the painting, but they are in there nevertheless. As unlikely as it may be, my hope is that you will feel what you cannot see.

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