Studies and Series
Texture is a rhythm. Line is a language. Style is much more than just a signature. To be able to tell the stories that I'm compelled to share, I call upon every style, language and rhythm I know. I prefer to work in ideas, in moments, in spurts and on multiple pieces at a time. Sometimes they take years to finish, sometimes only hours. For me, this work is passion, it's the connection between creativity and intuition and it happens in studies and series, paint and poetry.
Most of my work focuses on nature, most often representing landscapes and the human body, sometimes both. Many of my projects have also incorporated a surrealist focus distorting movement, perspective and color. Lately, I've been playing with the way nature can do that organically through fog and light.
The Water Bearer
This series walks the line between detail and knowledge. It is a play of control, offering my paint to the business of dripping gravity; letting it form shape before translating the details of imagined and recognized landscapes. In these pieces, I prefer to hold space, sharing only the symbols of my wilderness.
Night Light
Love your darks. I have learned that there is power in seeing the face of your fear. There is knowledge in the unknown, there is light in the night.
The Nature Of The Body
This series has spanned a number of years and plays through a variety of styles, but the root focus is the same. I am interested in the body as an emotional experience, with the way we carry ourselves, the way it shapes our bones.
Movement in Stillnes
This series is an ongoing investigation on the ways paint can describe atmospheric perspective both through illusion and sculptural painty build up. This style often relies more on my formal training by telling the full story; full colors covering canvas, overlapping lines, more is more. Dried paint carrying all the movement of liquid.
Poetry
The Gardener
The winter garden
is in full bloom.
As snowfall flowers the fields.
Ice drops dollop the bare bones of twigs
which glisten whenever
they get the chance.
There's a clean freshness
and the wind is uninterrupted.
But even the critters can smell the sweetness
as they dig hastily into the snowy earth.
And even the people can’t resists it’s delicious bite on their cheeks.
This garden feast is barren of food,
but bountiful in glazed conifers.
A cornucopia of salted bramble.
A delectable landscape frosted white and set aglow in a
lightweight
yellow
overcast
December sky...
Don’t mind me
I’m just a winter gardener,
here to harvest.
Mirror Lake
There’s a boathouse small enough to hold hours of contemplation,
resting just on the other side of this cove,
cadmium red on late summer greens,
rolling barn doors and shadowed stacks of musty wood beams.
A warm sun reflects it's relief on the goosebumps of my back.
Toes curled into muddy lake carpet, turtles bob and curious fish nibble my heels.
The only sounds are from us critters...
Wise gray mamas coo secrets of nature to their bare-bottom babes.
And a loon calls clean across liquid sky.
Boats seem to fade and reappear behind and in between...
...and a goodwill lingers in a little rocky beachfront where we all seem to share the weeks quiet reflections.
Suitcase
I found an old suitcase
full of dusty
desperate spite,
some crumpled helpless fear, and folded weakened breath
zipped in along
It reeked of "I'll do it myself's"
and "I can't get out"
And it asked to be seen today
So I picked it up and drooped it over my shoulder
hung it on a canvas to dry