For color is the type of love. John Ruskin

More than any other practice, painting makes myself present to the world around me. Standing at the canvas, there’s an inescapable present-ness, an impossibility of not being present.

I make paintings from direct observation of natural landscapes as well as the bits and pieces - flowers, leaves, insects.  Whether it’s a landscape, still life or portrait, what connects everything is color: a palette begun for a landscape ends up in a flower or bug or portrait of a friend.

I look to see what’s there in front of me. I look to have the secret color - the memory of green in the autumn stalk, a fire burning along a shell's edge - yielded to me after the intimacy of a few hours spent with some piece of the world.  In return I offer my affections. 

I paint with both oil and watercolor media, directly in the landscape and in the studio. When outside, I paint start to finish with a deep breath at the beginning - all marks remain to be seen. Paintings made in the studio originate in sketches from the field with notes to remember - cerulean edge, lightest light, darkest cold black - notes on the vibrations. They become themselves over time. Lay it on. Scrape it off. Smear it over. Approximations, corrections, decisions until a particular story of space and color has unfolded. I finish when the space feels open, full of light and color, and everyone’s floating in it.