About My Work and My Creative Process

My paintings and collages are a dialogue with myself - an attempt to center myself and establish a tangible relationship with the intangible experiences, memories, and flights of imagination that grab me and won’t let go.


These images that insist on staying with me come from landscapes I’ve visited, photographs I’ve taken, books I’m reading, television news, and sometimes whatever happens to be in front of me. I’m often drawn to the mystery of tangled vegetation, decimated terrains, and objects that have an anthropomorphic presence. I start out with a general idea, but the work ends up going in its own, often unanticipated direction. I work intuitively, and I respond to impulses that arise from dialoguing with the materials and the image itself as it evolves. Thick, gloppy oil paint and torn, jagged shards of paper pasted together exhilarate me.


I have always felt that art is a repository of energy, and when a work speaks to us, it gifts us with its particular energy. I feel a particular kinship and emotional connection to works from certain Egyptian periods and to the paintings and sculptures of Pierre Bonnard, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, Giorgio Morandi, Leon Kossoff, Mamma Andersson, Andreas Eriksson, Kim Dorland, Matthew Wong, Forest Bess,  Gerhard Richter, James Castle, Richard Diebenkorn, Johannes Kjarval, Sidney Nolan, Milton Avery, Max Beckmann, James Merlin, Luc Tuymans, Janice Nowinski, Peter Doig, Max Beckmann - and of course Matisse...