About My Work and My Creative Process

My paintings and collages are internal conversations with myself, attempts to live with existential uncertainties, to try to understand my place in the world and my responses to what life presents me.

Images that stick in my mind and work their way into my art come from landscapes I’ve visited, photographs I’ve taken, books I’m reading, television news, and visceral experiences from my daily life. I’m drawn to the mystery of densely tangled or barren and decimated terrain, and objects with anthropomorphic presence. 

I start working from a general idea, but then the work goes its own way. Thick oil paint and torn, jagged shards of paper exhilarate me with the way they're able to come together to form a powerful image. I respond to clues or outright demands that the work gives me as it evolves. I tend to re-work pieces again and again, and this built-in history of constant change causes them to contain their own intense consciousness, which is independent of me.

I’ve always felt that good art is a container of truth and consciousness, and when a particular work in a museum or gallery calls to me, the awareness of that consciousness reminds me that I’m connected notjust to that artist but also to all others who are drawn to this work. So art helps me know that I’m not alone.

I feel gratitude for this connection with all my spiritual mentors: Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Max Beckman, Lucian Freud, Giorgio Morandi, Leon Kossoff, Gerhard Richter, Richard Diebenkorn, Forrest Bess, Milton Avery, Sidney Nolan, Johannes Kjaraval, Andreas Eriksson, Mamma Andersson, Kim Dorland, Matthew Wong, James Merlin, Luc Tuymans, Janice Nowinski, and Peter Doig,– just to name a few…