I am primarily a landscape artist painting in acrylic and watercolor. I lived for 11 years in the northern Catskill Mountains of New York and this is where I began to paint in earnest. The barns, old farmhouses, and small towns captivated me and inspired me to pick up a paint brush and begin the journey. Small towns like Middleburgh, Catskill, Hunter, and Woodstock became the locations where I felt most inspired. I am fascinated with the three elements of color, value, and shape and how they can create a visual experience that will move the observer from the simple intellectual appreciation of art to the place of imagination and wonder.
In representational work, the viewer is typically awed by the artist's ability to capture likenesses and portray them exactly as they occur in nature. This, however, rarely moves one beyond respect for the skill of the artist and appreciation of nature, to the place where the imagination is provoked to participate in the realm of possibilities. In one sense I try to alter color relationships in such a way that the observer's intellect will be bypassed and then become engaged on the level of what could be versus what is.
I am an artist who is continually experimenting with style and method to make a connection between reality and imagination. Sometimes color is the bridge and at other times it is line and value. While a consistent graphic appearance is considered by traditional thinking to be a mark of artistic maturity, I believe that it can also be an indication that the artist has crystallized, become mechanical, and abandoned the journey for ultimate things. Because we are created in the image of God, there is a continual impulse toward the eternal and the unending. After all, that is what the artist seeks, that which is permanent in a temporal world...the poet with words, the musician with notes, and so with paint and paper I try to capture a passing moment and keep it from escaping into the past...
