About My Work and My Creative Process

My paintings and collages are conversations with myself, attempts to understand my place in the world, and my responses to life in front of me.

I’m drawn to densely tangled, barren, and decimated landscapes and seascapes that evoke awe and existential discomfort. Images that work their way into my art come from terrains I’ve visited, books I’m reading, television news, and quotidian experiences from my daily life.

Thick oil paint and torn, jagged shards of paper exhilarate me as they seem to interact with one another to come together into an image of their own choice that contains surprises for me. I find change exciting, and tend to constantly re-work pieces, causing them to have a layered intensity. I respond to work that shows vestiges of change and reveals clues to its history of evolution.

I feel daily gratitude to other artists whose work inspires me, nourishes my spirit and soul, and allows me to feel part of a tribe and tradition greater than myself: Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Max Beckman, Lucian Freud, Giorgio Morandi, Leon Kossoff, Gerhard Richter, Richard Diebenkorn, Forrest Bess, Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, Sidney Nolan, Johannes Kjaraval, Andreas Eriksson, Mamma Andersson, Wendy Gittler, Janice Nowinski, Matthew Wong, James Merlin, Luc Tuymans, and Peter Doig – just to name a few…