ARTIST STATEMENT

Since moving to California in 2007 I’ve primarily been painting urban and rural scenes from life. Many of my recent works are of San Diego’s freeways and overpasses, where I’m attracted to their monumental dominance over the landscape. The freeway’s gestural flow and their dramatic contrasts of light and dark transport your eye into and through the painting as well as forming geometric divisions and intervals. As a side note, I spent much time as a teen hitchhiking around the country, partly for adventure, and partly to escape; I often hitched for the sake of hitching itself and no destination in particular. My painting today is similar in that I paint most times for the joy of painting itself and not necessarily to arrive at a specific destination of narrative meaning. My subject matter and style of painting draws inspiration from the masters of a painterly perceptual realist tradition, such as; Corot, Cezanne, Charles Hawthorne, George Bellows, Edwin Dickinson, Fairfield Porter, Antonio Lopez Garcia and my mentor and teacher George Nick, who studied with Edwin Dickinson and painted with Fairfield Porter.

I paint directly from observed nature, setting up my easel on mountaintops or street corners. Confronted with quickly changing light there is an urgency that demands higher concentration and rapid decision making to simplify nature’s complexity. There is no time for noodling with excessive detail; I have to go straight for the essence of the scene. I want to convey the sensations I felt when on the scene – not a mere recording of photographic facts but also not changing the scene to suit my purpose. In my larger paintings I will return to the site over many sessions at the same time of day and lighting conditions. I use the strengths and limitations inherent to the scene as I find it - a challenge for me to find the inherent poem the scene is trying to tell and to read it with my own voice. By keeping the process honest I avoid artifice and formula.

My latest series of Mt. Woodson boulders I am painting small one sitting paintings of some of the greatest views of San Diego County. I hike for an hour up this steep mountain to paint abstract configurations of the boulders and their surroundings. My immediate appeal is the color of light at different times of day on these warm light gray, often house-sized, granite boulders with their dramatic backdrop of San Diego county and the distant mountains and ocean. I paint portraits of each specific boulder and show the relation of big boulders to little, dark to light, soft to hard, close to far as well as the capturing the overall gestures and expressions. I show the boulders and countryside in a specific light, space and time; retaining the sense of place and veracity of the moment.

The geological processes that shape these monumental boulders show the effectiveness of persistent erosion. The ecological catastrophe’s confronting us today sadly seem like they’ll also require geological timelines to solve. The meditative slow art of landscape painting is like raindrops eroding a mountain but perhaps it still wields enough power to inspire and perhaps offer one more reason to why nature is worth protecting.